I recall when I was younger, I used to deliberately follow this advice - "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." However, it looks like having a "big" breakfast doesn't make any difference unlike what the traditional wisdom suggests.
From the linked article:
If you try to eat earlier in the day, making breakfast your biggest daily meal may not be so important, suggests another study, published in Cell Metabolism last month. Researchers had 30 subjects who were overweight follow two four-week diets: one with 45% of the day's calories in the morning, the other with 45% of the day's calories at dinner.
Researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the University of Surrey in England had expected those who had a big breakfast and small dinner would burn more calories and lose more weight. Instead, they found no differences in subjects after they followed the two meal patterns.
Our corner of the world also has a similar saying: "Keep the breakfast for yourself, give half the lunch to your enemy, and let them have the dinner."
However I have a sneaking suspicion this grew out of generations of peasants who needed almost 5 digit daily calories early in the day to sustain their backbreaking farm labor, and helped along by moralizing against lazy people who would get the village in trouble with the local lord or the imperial tax collectors.
From the linked article:
If you try to eat earlier in the day, making breakfast your biggest daily meal may not be so important, suggests another study, published in Cell Metabolism last month. Researchers had 30 subjects who were overweight follow two four-week diets: one with 45% of the day's calories in the morning, the other with 45% of the day's calories at dinner.
Researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the University of Surrey in England had expected those who had a big breakfast and small dinner would burn more calories and lose more weight. Instead, they found no differences in subjects after they followed the two meal patterns.