Many people who want to lose weight try to pick which meals they feel they can skip in order to reduce their intake of calories, and breakfast and dinner are the two meals that most people skip. Some diets promote an after-six timeframe, wherein no food is taken in after six, but with today’s busy lifestyles that go well into the night, few people are actually successful with that. Instead, more people feel they have more willpower to skip breakfast, as they are usually in a hurry to get to work anyway so not having breakfast is usually much more convenient.
However, experts in weight loss insist on this one thing, and that is never to skip breakfast. Although it may sound contradictory to what you believe, as skipping that first meal sounds like a way to avoid the additional intake of calories, there are reasons why having a heavy breakfast may actually spell wonders for your weight loss goals:
1. Breakfast is the first meal of the day, and you need the nutrients to fuel you through the rest of the day. When you skip breakfast, your body and brain are deprived of necessary fuels, and you wind up feeling sluggish. By lunch time, you might feel too hungry that you wind up wolfing down whatever you see. It would seem that psychologically, skipping that first meal makes you feel like you deserve a heavy lunch full of high-fat or high-sugar items.
2. When you skip breakfast, your body makes up for the missing energy by preserving whatever energy it can hold in. This means your metabolism is actually put on hold. When you want to lose weight, this means that for those hours you are active but holding off a meal, your body prefers not to burn any calories, so you end up on the losing end.
3. Hormone-wise, studies show that when you first wake up, your body releases a hormone that gives you a craving for complex carbohydrates. This is the perfect time to stock up on this healthy food option, like whole-grain cereal, whole-wheat bread, or perhaps fruits. If that desire is not met, within a few hours, your brain releases a hormone that makes you crave simple carbohydrates like sugar, as well as high-fat food. Perhaps you have noticed that when you skip breakfast, you have a greater temptation to eat sweets at lunch. This is road kill for any diet plan.
4. When you plan on having breakfast, you are not too hungry as to be mindless of what you eat. As such, you will be better equipped to make healthy food choices, such as reaching for sugar-free cereal or healthy oats instead of donuts early in the morning. As a result, you will also be less hungry come lunch time, and you will also be in a similarly healthy frame of mind to pick more fruits and vegetables to put on your lunch tray.
5. When you go to work on a full stomach, you are less likely to be distracted or unfocused, which reduces work-related stress for the entire morning. This means you will be less likely to binge eat at lunch after having a particularly harassed morning session. Instead, you will feel vibrant and alert and less inclined to look for comfort food.
These basic points should show you the importance that a heavy breakfast plays in losing weight naturally. Of course, if you have formed a habit of not having breakfast, it might take a while to adjust to a new schedule, especially if you are frequently caught up for time. But with some advanced planning and as long as you stick with it for the first couple of weeks, you will definitely appreciate the changes it does to your daily routine. And eventually, you will also start noticing an improvement in your weight, as the healthy eating habits will definitely have their repercussions before long.
