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Breakfast: Still the Least Important Meal of the Day

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Earlier this year I wrote a bit about how skipping breakfast can be an excellent strategy for losing weight. I’ve been employing this strategy for about a year now and I’m convinced that it’s been an important component to my maintenance of a low body-fat composition (along with eating healthy, real food and avoiding processed nonsense). Every day I wake up, have a coffee or two, to start my day, and break my fast roughly 2 hours after waking up. When I started this routine, I was a bit hungry in the mornings, but after a few days my body adapted and the hunger cues subsided. Additionally, I never once felt groggy or low-energy, which is a huge (and irrational) fear for people who don’t have to give up breakfast.

Now, I’ll be honest- if you eat a healthy diet and exercise on a regular basis, there is no need for you to give up your propensity for eating as soon as you wake up. As long as you are living a healthy lifestyle, you’ll pretty much be able to eat whenever you want and your body won’t suffer. However, if you carry around a few extra pounds and are having a hard time jump-starting the fat loss process, skipping breakfast is definitely a strategy that you should attempt to employ; just make sure you eat responsibly the rest of the day and take in enough nutritionally-dense calories for your activity level.37618977

When I first posted about skipping breakfast, I definitely got a lot of push-back, as we as a society have always been told: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” Sadly, there just isn’t much evidence to support this statement. If you’re going to be extremely active all day, then sure, breakfast certainly becomes more important, but most people are far from active 9-5.

The other day I came across a piece on the NY Times entitled Myths Surround Breakfast and Weight, a title that obviously caught my attention. Please feel free to give the article a read, but in summary:

  • New research shows that the idea that eating breakfast helps you lose weight stems largely from misconstrued studies.
  • Only a handful of rigorous, carefully controlled trials have tested the claim and generally conclude that missing breakfast has either little or no effect on weight gain, or that people who eat breakfast end up consuming more daily calories than those who skip it.
  • The only long-term, carefully controlled trial that randomly assigned people to routinely eat or go without breakfast and then measured the effect on their body weight found moderately obese adults who were habitual breakfast skippers lost an average of roughly 17 pounds when they were put on a program that included eating breakfast every day. However, the study also showed that regular breakfast eaters who were instructed to avoid eating breakfast daily lost an average of nearly 20 pounds. Eating breakfast nor skipping breakfast seemed to elicit a distinct fat-loss advantage but instead, those participants making the most drastic changes to their current eating routine saw the best results.
  • Many subsequent studies mis-cited the original findings, perpetuating the myth that breakfast is critical to a healthy lifestyle and weight loss.
  • New studies at Cornell have shown that, depriving people of breakfast can lead them to eat more calories at lunch but that those extra calories do not make up for the calories they missed at breakfast, so at the end of the day, they still end up eating fewer calories over all. The same researchers have argued that for some adults, skipping breakfast may actually be a good way to reduce weight – not gain it.

In conclusion, we must keep an open mind about how and when we eat. If you are overweight and eat a heavy breakfast, try postponing your first meal until an hour or two after waking up. If you never eat breakfast and are having a hard time losing weight, try eating something as soon as you wake up and minimize eating large meals later in the day. In the end, we need to forget old sayings like “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” and start doing things that work for our individual bodies. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but if you’re looking for a new strategy to jump-start some weight loss, don’t be afraid to go against the grain and challenge conventional wisdom!

For additional information on how to responsibly incorporate skipping breakfast into your daily routine, don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

- DW



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