> small meals every 3 hours

I can't imagine what food combinations would constitute a small meal that would be eaten 5/6 times a day. Sample menu for a full day?

Here is a relatively typical day https://imgur.com/a/WQeAr

I tend to increase my intake right before and after gym sessions. That's why 2nd lunch and Dinner are bigger than the others.

And on this particular day I felt like having candy after dinner because I was low on carbs, so midnight meal was slightly smaller than usual.

No green vegetables? Spinach, broccoli, peas...?

Don't track em because they don't add much calories. But yes plenty of those

How are your teeth/gums? From what I understand, one of the major factors in tooth decay is frequency of eating, since teeth remineralize between meals, and frequent eating gives them less chance to do so.

This is the direct opposite of IF, fwiw. It may feel better than large meals, but there's no reason to expect similar long term effects.

I know. It has great short term effects tho and as a human, I naturally prefer to optimize for those.

And my pet theory is that most of the effect in energy levels and well being that people get from IF is actually just from being mindful of what they eat for the first time.

Funfact: everyone feels better when they start eating well. Exactly which trick they use to make themselves eat well isn't too important.

All that to say that so far whenever I talked to anyone who's discovered intermittent fasting and said how much more energy they have now than they did before, when asked about their habits before, it's usually something like "Oh I just ate whatever I could find at random times in the day with pretty much no thought given to what I'm doing"