Do you think breakfast should be the biggest meal of the day, and dinner the smallest?

Time.
You have more time to enjoy a large meal in the evening, especially including preparation and cooking time.
In the morning, most people need to get up early, either for work or school, and are still tired.
For a large meal, you would need to get up even earlier.
NO ONE wants to do that.

Not really accepting that argument. Fast food places serve breakfasts and they tend to be smaller than what you would get for dinner.

I have a toast and tea for breakfast. You don’t burn many calories while you sleep. But between 8AM and 5PM a normal person burns the most. So you need to make up for that. So big dinner.

This assumes that you are replacing calories burned and not preparing for what could be burned in the future. Like a bear..

It dioesn’t make sense, unless the person has a very physically demanding job. Just on general principle, in our culture, we go about six hours between breakfast and lunch, and the same between lunch and dinner, and twelve hours from dinner to breakfast. My system can’t handle a large or nutrient dense meal first thing, and I do better with a lunch and dinner of approximately the same size.

@johnpowell Fast food don’t “tend to be” anything. It’s what and how much you order. A sausage and cheese McMuffin and a hash brown isn’t any smaller or larger than a cheeseburger with French fries.

We have the whole day to burn off the calories @canidmajor. You wouldn’t have to do anything really special…hell order through fast food. You could then just skip lunch. It’s just odd that in America we eat the biggest meal of the day at the time we become most sedentary.

Fine, whatever. I am working on the premise that we are bound a certain amount by culture, but we also have differing rhythms. I am diurnal, I have some friends who are decidedly nocturnal.
My focus is sustenance and nutrition, not “burning off calories”, as yours appears to be.

Depends on my motivation at the moment.

Fine. Whatever. Aren’t you a bit old for that kind of thing?

When I was working, my breakfast was the largest meal of the day, calorie wise. I usually skipped lunch because I wasn’t hungry, then dinner would be a sandwich or soup.
On farms I think the biggest meal was, actually, lunch. They had big breakfasts, too.

Hahaha…from Miss Egg McMuffin herself! :-)

Yes, my breakfast was usually something from McDonald. Gosh. I think I’ve set my own personal record for having not gone there for…3 weeks! I got mad at them when they quit serving their bagels. They were just better bagels than what I had at home.

Bagels in Kansas or McDonalds – one shudders at the thought!

What? They had really good bagels.

And yes. My motivation is calorie driven. The rest follows naturally.

I get up at 9:40, so I do not even bother with breakfast, and go straight to lunch.

I’m fixing a home made Egg McMuffin, LOL!

I have peanut butter toast for breakfast.

I had triple berry oatmeal crisp 10 minutes ago.

I think it doesn’t matter. Calories in a 24 hour period matter in my opinion. How many calories you take in, and whether you burn them all up or not.

@janbb Lol. Once in a blue moon there are good bagels outside of the tri-state area, but it’s not easy to find. I can’t imagine that McDonalds had good bagels. I’m with you on that.

The idea is you have the time through the day to burn off the calories from a big breakfast, at night you may have more time to enjoy a large dinner, but you are winding down from the day and don’t get a chance to burn the calories off from a large dinner.
Hence so many,including myself are over weight.

So as other have pointed out,it’s a time thing people are more rushed in the morning and don’t have time to enjoy a large meal they have to get to school or work.

^^Your body is made to store “extra” calories, and then pull from storage when needed.

Well mine must be doing some extra hoarding^^

Thank you @SQUEEKY2. That was exactly my point. Most of us “store” far more calories than we will ever “need”, at least here in America.