Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight

The more interesting question I think is not whether skipping breakfast might help lose weight, it is whether the weight loss is due to lower overall caloric intake, the timing of digestion reducing bioavailability, the timing of when sugar became available to the body impacting targeted fat burn or somehow enhancing the body&#x27;s ability to burn fat cells, or maybe the types of &quot;breakfast&quot; foods skipped, or just general impact on dietary choices,... or maybe it was...<p>Obviously I think the study is asking too high-level a question, and barely skimming the surface of how things work. Feels like the same sort of thinking that produced the alternative finding.

At the end of the day it will always be calories in vs. calories out.<p>My personal experience is that I try to only eat 1 meal per day. Intermittent fasting is nothing new, and when I combine it with a low carb diet, it is extremely effective for me. I went from ~300 down to 225 in a matter of 4-5 months.<p>As long as I am busy, I hardly notice any hunger during the day now that I am used to the schedule and the 1 meal makes it much harder to over eat. 2000 calories is extremely hard to take in all at once, so it basically puts you at quite a deficit just due to the logistics of eating that quantity of food in a small window of time.

A couple of thoughts:<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that both of the breakfasts in the study were high in high-glycemic carbohydrates. It would be interesting to see if the result holds when eating something like eggs and bacon for breakfast.<p>Second, since most people fast overnight, you get the double whammy of low insulin (making fat cells more willing to give up stored energy) and a caloric deficit in the morning. It seems plausible that extending the period of time when that is the case would result in fat loss.<p>I&#x27;ve personally had pretty good luck (~34.5&quot; to ~32.5&quot; waist measurement over a couple of weeks) with eliminating most carbohydrates between about 5PM and 10AM.

This is why it&#x27;s hard to take the field of nutrition seriously.<p>&quot;New study finds peach fuzz makes you lose weight&quot;<p>5 years later<p>&quot;New study finds peach fuzz makes you gain weight&quot;

Studies have shown that overweight people don&#x27;t necessarily eat more calories or have less active lifestyles than their normal weight peers [1][2][3][4].<p>A major factor that contributes to excess weight is the absorption rate of dietary lipids in the gut, which can be influenced by anatomy, gut microbiota, genetics, and other characteristics [5][6][7][8][9]. The rate at which the body absorbs fat from food during digestion plays a key role.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;24527563" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;24527563</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;23057-overweight-teens-kids-calories-weight-loss.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;23057-overweight-teens-kids-calor...</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;22006481" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;22006481</a><p>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;23320866" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;23320866</a><p>[5] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3601187&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3601187&#x2F;</a><p>[6] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;brainwaves&#x2F;the-food-fight-in-your-guts-why-bacteria-will-change-the-way-you-think-about-calories&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;brainwaves&#x2F;the-food-figh...</a><p>[7] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;how-gut-bacteria-help-make-us-fat-and-thin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;how-gut-bacteria-h...</a><p>[8] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ajpendo.physiology.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;296&#x2F;6&#x2F;E1183.short" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ajpendo.physiology.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;296&#x2F;6&#x2F;E1183.short</a><p>[9] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3213306&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3213306&#x2F;</a>

Losing weight comes down to a pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is a calorie deficit. It&#x27;s simple science and fact that eating less calories than your maintenance calories (basal metabolic rate) will cause you to lose weight. Once you tackle that, you can move up the pyramid and fine tune to maximize the weight loss by incorporating tactics such as meal timing, quality of ingredients, types of food eaten, or different macronutrient percentages. But without the bottom of the pyramid, there can&#x27;t be anything on top.

There&#x27;s a &#x27;natural&#x2F;evolutionary&#x27; argument to be made in favor of skipping breakfast too: most animals do not store food and need to hunt or forage as and when hunger arises. This requires a certain amount of time and activity. So it&#x27;s unlikely that animals have evolved a need to eat first thing in the morning.

But no-one <i>really</i> cares about weight - they care about body composition. That is key to understanding all of this, and it&#x27;s missing from these results. Who cares if you lose weight if it&#x27;s muscle wasting away? Who cares if your weight stays the same but you&#x27;re losing fat and gaining heavier muscle?

I researched Yokozunas and here&#x27;s my findings.<p>They skip breakfast every single day and exercise for at least 5 hours before breakfast.<p>After lunch, they sleep. With plenty food and no physical activity, the body converts the food to fat. Same thing happens after dinner - sleep.<p>Before electricity, people ate dinner before sun down. This left enough time for some digestion and burning of excess energy.<p>My conclusion:<p>Skipping a meal is a great idea. The question is when. I&#x27;ve decided that the best time to skip a meal is dinner - not breakfast. Or as I tell my friends, Sleep Hungry.<p>Edit:<p>Yokozunas in Japan have perfected the art of inputting normal sized people and outputting obese people. I figured doing the exact opposite is the key to weight loss.

The advice that &quot;breakfast is the most important meal of the day&quot; is, as I recall, based on similar junk science. They looked at lots of kids, recorded how often they ate breakfast, then looked at how well they did in school.<p>The kids who ate breakfast did better in school. Yay, breakfast is good for you.<p>Or, possibly, the correlation between eating breakfast and doing well in school has another explanation. One possible explanation of the correlation is that kids who don&#x27;t eat breakfast are poor, and the poor statistically dont do as well in school due to other factors.

Not eating makes you lose weight. Doesn&#x27;t matter when you eat, eating less, and eating better food (fresh, non-processed. If it doesn&#x27;t run, grow on a tree&#x2F;plant, or swim, don&#x27;t eat it) will make you lose weight.

Instead of skipping the breakfast, try not to eat after sun-set. Trust me, you&#x27;ll love the difference you&#x27;ll see after a few months.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m following this principle every single day from past 2 years.

Skipping breakfast is part of the &quot;carb backloading&quot; diet. Seems to work well.

I think it is more of a drink coffee lose weight argument.

Yes, not eating helps you lose weight.

I _never_ eat breakfast and I&#x27;m fat.

Eating less helps you lose weight. News at eleven. Seriously, how difficult is it to understand that? Once when I was in the US I had some pancakes for breakfast and on the side was a huge chunk of white mass that looked like a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I took a large bite and oh boy.. it was butter. Plain butter. That chunk alone was about half of the calorie need of an average young person. Oh, and then there was the maple sirup, chocolate, and artificially sweetened orange juice. No wonder the US is so obese.