The #1 rule in any credible weight loss program should be – don’t neglect your breakfast
A good breakfast refuels your body after a night of sleep. Your body needs a heavy breakfast to keep its energy levels high. When you skip breakfast, that impacts your energy level, and eventually your health, in a bad way.
Having a heavy breakfast won’t cause you to gain too much weight as long as you have healthy foods such as eggs or oatmeal rather than, say, cakes or cookies. In fact, there is a plenty of research that conclusively proves that heavy breakfasts, less heavy lunches and light dinners are critical for weight loss.
How Having a BIG breakfast helps…
A big breakfast helps you feel full for the whole morning and curbs emotional eating or binge eating later in the day. Of course, what you have for breakfast is equally important. When you have a big breakfast regularly, you will experience a noticeable weight loss.
A study published in 2005 “The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,” said that women who skipped breakfast tended to weigh more than their counterparts who never missed a breakfast.
Why You Should Eat More in the Morning and Less in the Evening..
According to John De Castro, professor and chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso, who carried out a study that had 900 participants, when you have your food really matters, as evening eating was less satisfying for people, and they ended up having more food.
Dr. De Castro says:
“The late-night period was when the highest-density foods were eaten. Eating a high proportion of daily intake in the late evening, compared to earlier in the day, was associated with higher overall intake. In the evening, you get lower satiety. People tend to eat very large meals, but then eat again shortly afterward.”
Dr. De Castro writes in his report:
“High proportional intake in the morning is associated with low overall daily intake.”
This effectively means that eating a big breakfast is the best way to curbing evening binge overeating.
That’s why it is important to consume at least 33% of your daily calories in the morning – which may amount to 600 calories, which is certainly more than what most people tend to have.
How People Lost Weight Just By Having a Heavy Breakfast…
There has been a significant study done by the Tel Aviv University on the weight loss benefits of having a heavy breakfast published in the journal Obesity. The study had 50 participants, all obese women.
They were each assigned one of two 12-week diet plans. The first diet plan required the women to have 700 calories in the morning, 500 calories at lunch and 200 calories at dinner.
The second diet plan was the reverse – the participants were to eat 200 calories at breakfast, 500 calories at lunch and 700 calories at dinner. The types of food recommended for breakfast, lunch and dinner were the same for both diet plans and included cakes and cookies.
It was found that the participants who had heavy breakfasts lost 17.8 pounds in weight and 3 inches off their waistlines on an average. While those that had light breakfasts and heavy dinner lost only 7.3 pounds in weight and just 1.4 inches off their waistlines, on an average.
Having a Good Breakfast Makes You Eat Less Throughout The Day
Further, women who had heavy breakfasts tended to overeat less during the rest of the day and had much lower levels of glucose, triglycerides and insulin. This puts them at a lower risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease, hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes.
According to a weight loss specialist, Daniela Jakubowicz M.D., who is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, the body’s metabolism works best early in the day, so our body is less likely to store the food you have in the morning as fat, as it would if you have the same in the evening.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that you can have anything you like for breakfast. As far as possible have foods that are high in protein, such as eggs, lean meat or yogurt. Have a cheat food such as a sweet if you really feel very hungry, but only at breakfast.
This curbs your craving for the rest of the day. So, have a heavy breakfast, a less heavy lunch and a particularly light dinner, for maximum weight loss benefits.
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