Is eating breakfast important?

[DeletedAccount 45]

I did my dissertation work on coral reefs, so I'm not a health scientist, but I did teach experimental design to undergraduates when I was in graduate school, my PhD is in biology, and I do get paid to write about health research for a popular audience. There is nothing wrong with the design of this research study.

Yes, 18% of people who skip breakfast are not fat; this is not an indication that skipping breakfast is a great way to lose weight. Maybe you gain weight when you eat breakfast, but you are a single data point and you are not proof that skipping breakfast is a great way for most people to lose weight.

It's awesome to read research, and it's immportant to be aware of the limitations of what research can tell you, but crapping all over a research study because you can't control for every variable in a correlation study or because it's not a double blind control study (very few studies are) is throwing out valuable information for no good reason.

Research studies are peer-reviewed, which means at least three expert epidemiology researchers read this paper and agreed that the study design was sound and the conclusions were reasonable. As someone who isn't an expert in this field, but who is familiar with how science works, I feel comfortable trusting the reviewers judgement.

That doesn't mean I believe eating breakfast will make me thin. It means on days I have to skip breakfast, I pay closer attention to my food choices, try not to over snack, and choose to eat breakfast most days so that I don't get over hungry and make poor choices.

Ya'll do what works for you.

[Little Green 582]

Yay for an interesting and lively discussion/debate, y'all!

I'm inclined to agree with @loey13 based on my reading and countless exhortations to eat breakfast from dietitians and my therapist (an eating disorder specialist).

I think that it's possible we could all agree on the following statement: If you skip breakfast, you may develop more hunger, leading you to eat more throughout the day, which could lead to weight gain.

Thoughts? There are obviously exceptions to every rule so hopefully that is a reading of the study's conclusion that could apply to most people generally.

[FluffyChix 17,409]

9 hours ago, Little Green said:

Yay for an interesting and lively discussion/debate, y'all!

I'm inclined to agree with @loey13 based on my reading and countless exhortations to eat breakfast from dietitians and my therapist (an eating disorder specialist).

I think that it's possible we could all agree on the following statement: If you skip breakfast, you may develop more hunger, leading you to eat more throughout the day, which could lead to weight gain.

Thoughts? There are obviously exceptions to every rule so hopefully that is a reading of the study's conclusion that could apply to most people generally.

You know, what's very interesting...when I used to do alternate day fasting with calorie reduction, my experience was that it got easier the longer you did ADF. Also, for me, it was easier to go all day in a fast from the previous night's dinner, until the current day's dinner, then have a lovely 400-500 calorie dinner and to know the fast was completed. It's was a super easy lifestyle to maintain. Very, very little hunger. But when I got off of it for one of my reconstruction surgeries/recoveries, I just found that I couldn't make myself go back to eating that way. Not because it was hard. It was more that my "give a fuc*k" about losing weight broke for some reason...

[Little Green 582]

5 hours ago, FluffyChix said:

You know, what's very interesting...when I used to do alternate day fasting with calorie reduction, my experience was that it got easier the longer you did ADF. Also, for me, it was easier to go all day in a fast from the previous night's dinner, until the current day's dinner, then have a lovely 400-500 calorie dinner and to know the fast was completed. It's was a super easy lifestyle to maintain. Very, very little hunger. But when I got off of it for one of my reconstruction surgeries/recoveries, I just found that I couldn't make myself go back to eating that way. Not because it was hard. It was more that my "give a fuc*k" about losing weight broke for some reason...

Yikes!!! That is like week 2 bariatric surgery level calories lol. It may be difficult to tell if that is from the fasting or from weird hormonal things happening because of extreme restriction. I wonder what it would feel like to do the all day fast and then have an 1800 calorie (healthy obvs) dinner.

[MrsGamgee 756]

I've often wondered what influence, if any, the 'when' of skipping breakfast has. What I mean is, most girls I knew started skipping breakfast sometime around junior high/middle school. What is going on developmentally, in habit formation and in physical development at that time that could be noteworthy? If I'm honest, when I look back at my relationship with food, that is about the same time in my life when things started to go haywire. Just a bit of a tangent to this conversation...

[Newme17 3,444]

I always eat my breakfast. Sometimes I break my fast by 8am others by 12 noon. It’s still breakfast either way. Have y’all thought of that??? 😊

i don’t eat for the sake of it being “time for breakfast”...that’s overeating in my opinion.