Eating breakfast for fat loss....

Today's post, Thursday, 3-18-2010

Something like 90% plus of the people who have lost over 30 pounds and kept it off always eat breakfast. That’s the most important thing to know.

The reason for this is that people who do not, are often so hungry by mid-morning, they eat fattening snacks while people who eat breakfast are able to pass on doing so. Or they are so hungry by mid-day or even evening that they eat more food or eat more fattening foods than people who eat breakfast and don’t have that excessive hunger driving them.

Secondly, people who always eat breakfast apparently burn more calories than people who do not. So, in addition to being more successful at losing fat, breakfast eaters can literally eat more and still lose fat and weight on the scale. That’s extremely important because it makes keeping the fat and weight off doable.

Similarly, your body seems to process foods of every kind better at breakfast than other meals. Foods like whole grains and whole fresh fruit and fruit juice that are a bit fattening and bad carbs like waffles, pancakes, and even syrup and jam on some days can be OK at breakfast when they would stop your fat loss if eaten later in the day.

In fact, one book is out by an author who found that people who had favorite but fattening treats at breakfast one to three days a month were better able to stick with their fat loss efforts and lose the fat and keep it off than people who never did so. But eating the foods at breakfast was critical. This effect was much less the case if people ate these foods later in the day.

In addition, I saw a study that found that, in that study, always eating breakfast was critical for women who wanted to lose fat weight but somewhat less so for men.

Given the other things, I think it’s clear that men who always eat breakfast will be more successful at losing fat and keeping it off than men who do not.

But, women who never eat breakfast may simply not be able to lose any significant amount of fat at all!

The article I saw on always eating breakfast noted that some people needed to use very time efficient ways to eat breakfast to be able to do it every day.

There are two ways to do this.

1. You can stock foods that you can literally grab, sit down, and eat such as string cheese, yogurt that can simply be spooned from the container into a dish and eaten, and individual pieces of fresh fruit. (I currently use some fresh fruit; milk; fruit juice; and low cal, low sugar fruit juice; and a third of a can of cooked lentils in this way at many of my breakfasts.)


2. You can prepare your breakfast or parts of it, the night before -- or even better, prepare it on one of the weekend days the previous weekend. (I currently fix the oatmeal I eat sometimes for breakfast the night before on the days that I eat it and then eat it cold the following day. I also boil up the three boiled eggs I eat one of on three days a week the weekend before. Then I just grab one and eat it for breakfast.)

By doing this, you can have a decent breakfast on days you need to leave quickly in 7 to 10 minutes or so.

Some people who haven’t even got that much time on some days even simply pack their breakfast the night before and then spend 5 minutes or so first thing when they get to work eating it.

The second consideration is for heart health. Always eating breakfast protects your heart. In fact, even people who eat heart unhealthy breakfasts tend to have better heart health than people who never do so. Of course people who have heart healthy breakfasts do better than people who have poor ones.

Third, people – particularly children and teens – who always eat breakfast perform better mentally all day long than people who don’t. And, the people who have coffee or tea with their breakfast, do the best of all.