Since your last paragraph is the idea behind intermittent fasting diets (and one hypothesized mechanism) I wouldn't be too quick to label it as bad: it's been linked, if inconclusively, to improved key blood markers and increased lifespan. It may be bad for weight loss – I don't know enough about nutrition to say, really – perhaps that's what you had in mind.
I would have to say from my experience using them, and all that I've read about them, that intermittent fasting diets are marvelous.
In regards to the post above, when I IF I don't skip meals a vast majority of the time and I am never hungry/unsatisfied. Check out the introductory/about articles at leangains.com for some very great info on intermittent fasting protocols. I very much like his recommended 8 hour feeding protocol. Haven't heard complaints about it.
Also, from an evolutionary standpoint food would have been in constantly varying quantities, ...
I've just read the Four-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss. It seems on the face of it like ridiculously valuable material, if true - like what the completed version of Michael Vassar's proposed reboot of dietary science would look like at the finish point if dieting turned out to be more susceptible to Munchkinism than in my wildest dreams. Ferriss also talks the rationalist talk quite well in this book, much more so than in Four-Hour Workweek; he cites the experiments and occasionally says things like "I spent a lot of money on this and I expected it to work and it didn't work at all" or "I tried this and it seemed to work and I have no idea why it worked and I think it was probably a placebo effect."
Does the LessWrong hivemind have an opinion about 4HB? Has anyone tried it and found that it doesn't work, or that it does work, or that it works but not as well as Ferriss thinks it should work?