Does eating 3 large meals work better than eating 5 small meals?

[cjl]

Well it is quite possible you are overweight because you eat too little. Your body thinks you are starving and it stores everything you eat for the future.
This is basically what happened to me. I've been gluten sensitive all my life but I didn't know about that so although I ate a lot, my body didn't get proper nutrition (it couldn't absorb nutrients from food) so I was chronically malnutrished, but on the outside I've always been overweight / obese.

That's not really possible. If you're eating below your overall energy expenditure, that is the "rainy day" your body has been storing fat for, and it burns fat to make up the energy deficit (since your intake is below your TDEE). Your metabolism does slightly vary based on intake, but it's generally a pretty small effect. It's much more common to incorrectly estimate how much you are eating - it can be very educational (and very helpful for weightloss) to calorie count religiously for a while - record the nutritional information of everything you eat and see what your actual totals tend to be.

 

[WWGD]

Maybe the best way is a subjective one: keeping track of what you eat and comparing the associated resulting level of energy and how well you feel. Your diet may depend on too many factors to be able to come up with a neat list of foods one should eat. EDIT: The best diet, besides eating enough fruits, vegetables and drinking enough water may depend on stress levels, amount of physical activity, recent diet , temperature, etc.