The key is consistency. Eating almost at the same time each day helps regulate your circadian rhythm, improves digestion and can help your body better manage cortisol and insulin.
The body thrives on discipline. When you eat irregularly, skipping meals one day and overeating the next, your metabolism, hormones, and digestion struggle to stay balanced.

Our body runs on an internal clock, and eating at regular times helps keep this clock in sync.

We often hear, ‘Eat only when you are hungry.’

But here is the catch: this works perfectly only if your hunger cues are reliable. For many people, especially those working long hours, having erratic schedules,
or dealing with chronic stress, hunger cues can become completely out of sync with their body’s actual energy needs.

That is where the idea of eating by the clock comes in. When you eat at roughly the same times every day, your body begins to anticipate those timings.
Over time, hunger cues begin to appear on a schedule, and that becomes a routine. It is like training your metabolism to stay balanced, not fluctuating between starvation and overeating.

If you wait to eat until you are really starving, several things could happen:

You might end up overeating because your body tries to compensate for lost energy, and you eat out of pity for not having eaten in a long time, which leads to eating more.
You see this as a reward for going hungry for so long.