For eons, mankind rarely, if ever, ate soon after they woke up in the morning. In fact, the concept of breakfast only became a thing during the industrial revolution. That was the time when people ate, in the morning, before leaving home for a full day’s work.

Breakfast and Calories

Because people have gotten by without breakfast for eons prior to the industrial revolution, it’s fair to say breakfast is not a necessity. Furthermore, research shows that it’s not necessary to have breakfast for you to have a healthy weight. Consequently, whether breakfast helps you lose weight or not, is up to each one of us. For some, eating breakfast means they eat more of their daily calorie intake in the morning. But, eating breakfast doesn’t guarantee they’ll eat less the rest of the day. Indeed, they may eat far more calories than necessary during the remainder of the day.

While those who skip breakfast, don’t necessarily eat less calories either. On the contrary, they could eat more calories during the remainder of the day to exceed what they would have eaten had they had a breakfast. Moreover, studies show that skipping breakfast doesn’t affect the total number of calories burned in a day.

Skipping Breakfast

Now, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommend you eat four or five small meals a day to stop feeling hungry. And, that includes breakfast. In fact, eating just a modest breakfast means you won’t get hungry later in the morning. On the other hand, skipping breakfast on days when you are working, may tempt you to drop by a fast food place or walk to a vending machine down the hall, and eat foods with lots of sugar, unhealthy fats and calories.

By the way, when you wake up in the morning, your blood sugar, needed by your brain and muscles, is low. Therefore, you may not have enough energy to do your morning chores. Incidentally a recent study found that the metabolic rates of those who had breakfast and those who didn’t were about the same. Also, another recent study reported that there was no significant difference in weight loss between those who ate breakfast and those who didn’t.

Benefits of Breakfast

Most of all, a healthy breakfast is a source of vitamins, lean proteins, healthy fats, and fiber from foods like dairy, fruits, and whole grains that help you to feel full. Indeed, you feel full longer because proteins and fiber take longer to get digested. Furthermore fiber, particularly soluble fiber slows the absorption of sugar and helps improve blood sugar levels so that you won’t get cravings for sugar.

And, if you exercise in the morning or early afternoon, breakfast provides the fuel needed to workout hard and burn more calories. On the other hand, exercising without breakfast, means that your depleted sugar levels won’t give you the energy needed for a hard workout. Consequently, going through your workouts may be a struggle.

Effects on Diet and Weight

Meanwhile, several studies have reported that skipping breakfast has little effect on your diet. Unfortunately, previous studies reporting that eating breakfast was important for successfully losing weight were not scientifically rigorous. Most noteworthy, recently researchers in Australia reviewed 13 different studies that ranged from 24-hour studies to 16-week studies. And they found that eating or skipping breakfast had little effect on your weight. However, researchers did find that people who lose weight and keep it off generally ate a healthy breakfast.

Most of all, if you eat breakfast to lose weight, then you need to not overeat and eat too many calories. And, if you skip breakfast to lose weight, you need to not overeat during lunch and/or dinner. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you eat breakfast or not. If you want to maintain or lose weight you need to monitor all your meals throughout the day.

Effects of Skipping Breakfast

On the other hand, while skipping breakfast won’t affect your ability to lose weight, it’s not helpful for your general health. Indeed, regularly skipping breakfast has the following effects on your general health:

1. First, the Journal of Frontiers of Human Neuroscience reported that breakfast restores glycogen and stabilizes insulin levels. In fact, when glucose levels are low you become hungrier, irritable and tired.
2. Next, your metabolic rate decreases which causes your body to use glucose stored in the muscles, which, in turn, causes muscles to waste away.
3. Finally, cortisol stress levels are highest when you wake up. And, this increases your hunger hormones. So, eating breakfast increases blood sugar levels, which, in turn, brings down levels of hunger hormones as well as cortisol levels. On the other hand, delaying or skipping breakfast, keeps or increases your cortisol levels. Regrettably, high cortisol levels make you feel anxious.

Meanwhile, other studies show that regularly skipping breakfast effects your physiological health in the following additional ways:

1. First, skipping breakfast increases diastolic and systolic blood pressure, blood concentrations of insulin, triglycerides, free fatty acids and LDL-cholesterol.
2. Second, skipping breakfast decreases blood concentrations of HDL-cholesterol.
3. Finally, skipping breakfast increases risk of atherosclerosis, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and high cholesterol levels. In fact, a Harvard study, spanning 16 years, of 27,000 men between the ages of 45 to 82 years, found that men who skipped breakfast were 27 percent more likely to experience heart attacks or have a coronary heart disease as the cause of their death.

Conclusion

In conclusion, eating modest breakfast is good for you because:

1. Of the health benefits.
2. Research shows that those who lose weight and keep if off eat healthy breakfast.
3. Finally, a healthy breakfast gives you energy to start your day and helps you get through to lunch.

Catherine Gomez