About Skipping Breakfast:
Do you remember your Mom telling you that breakfast was the most important meal of the day? Recent scientific research shows that your Mom was right! In fact, eating breakfast has been proven to be the simplest way of maintaining a healthy weight and even losing extra pounds.
We skip breakfast for various reasons: not feeling hungry in the morning, rushing to work or simply to save up some calories for later. Whatever your reason may be, know this: you’re not doing yourself or your health any favors, as medical research has consistently proven that skipping breakfast typically results in weight gain.
"People skip breakfast thinking they're cutting calories, but by mid-morning and lunch, that person is starved. Breakfast skippers replace calories during the day with mindless nibbling, bingeing at lunch and dinner. They set themselves up for failure." ~ Milton Stokes, RD, MPH, chief dietitian for St. Barnabas Hospital in New York City.
What happen when breakfast skips:
People who skipped breakfast were more than four times more likely to be obese than those who ate breakfast daily.
When you don’t eat in the morning your body thinks that you are starving. Because your body doesn’t know when it can expect the next food supply, it sends out an automatic signal to your cells to store up most of the energy you get from food as fat,
instead of allowing you to burn it. Prolonged fasting can increase your body's insulin response, which increases fat storage and causes weight gain.
If you skip breakfast your metabolic rate slows down, your blood sugar drops and your cholesterol might go up. As a result your energy level goes down and you’ll feel extra hungry around lunch time. This increases your chances of impulsive snacking, eating extra portions or overeating later during the day.
A recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology concludes that skipping meals and eating less frequently may result in packing on extra pounds.
"When you don't eat breakfast, you're actually fasting for 15 to 20 hours, so you're not producing the enzymes needed to metabolize fat to lose weight. Eating early in the day keeps us from "starvation eating" later on. But it also jump-starts your metabolism.”
~ Elisabetta Politi, RD, MPH, nutrition manager for the Duke Diet & Fitness Center at Duke University Medical School. Eating Early Jump-Starts Your Metabolism