Neither Eating Breakfast nor Skipping Breakfast is the Key to Weight Loss
For a long time, there has been a lot of talk about whether having or skipping breakfast will actually have an impact on your ability to lose weight with greater ease. You have probably heard that you should never skip breakfast, right? After all, it is the most important meal of the day. As it turns out, however, neither eating breakfast nor skipping breakfast is the key to weight loss. Continue reading to learn more.
What the Research Has Shown
According to Harvard Health Publishing, there have been quite a few studies that have analyzed the effects of eating breakfast when you are attempting to shed excess weight.
One study determined that, after several weeks, individuals who had breakfast ended up gaining weight compared to the people who did not bother eating breakfast, and this was the case for those who were overweight and those who were already at a healthy weight.
What about the idea that breakfast can help you consume fewer calories for the rest of the day? Well, that was also debunked when several studies were conducted to find out if breakfast really had an effect on total daily calorie intake. It turns out that the people in the studies who had breakfast ended up eating around 260 more calories compared to people who didn’t eat breakfast.
What Can You Do Instead?
The key to weight loss isn’t whether or not you eat breakfast, so go ahead and decide for yourself whether you want to have this meal or not. But, what you can also try is what is known as intermittent fasting.
If you can extend your typical overnight fast to around 16 hours, your insulin level and blood sugar levels can go down, causing your fat stores to be utilized for the energy that your body needs.
You can implement this easily into your routine by simply extending the overnight fasting that you do already. Experts have determined that you could end up shedding more weight and improving your metabolic rate by doing so.
So, there you have it: breakfast is not the key to weight loss after all; instead, the right intermittent fasting strategy might be more worth your while.
