Should I Eat Breakfast If I Am Trying To Lose Weight?

Hey there, Coffey: I’m trying to lose weight. As a rule, should I eat breakfast? Will that keep my metabolism high?  – Sally in Dallas

Hey, Sally!

There’s nothing wrong with eating breakfast if we’re hungry. But eating breakfast to ramp up metabolism is…well…problematic.

People find their way to my personal training studio having spent the last 10, 20, or even 50 years eating like it’s harvest time every day. For whatever reason, each arrives having decided they want to drop some or all of the excess fat they’ve stored as a result of their endless feast. They arrive having already spent oodles of time reading the “fitness” websites, and many are convinced of a few bubbly-blonde-busting-out-of-a-sports-bra-endorsed behaviors they’ll need to adopt in order to lose the weight. Among the top suggestions they’ve read is to never, ever skip breakfast.

We’ve all heard how important it is. We’ve read it online, too. Even fully-clothed doctors on TV extoll the virtues of never, ever missing that early-morning meal.

“Skipping breakfast slows the metabolism!”

“You’ll eat twice as much at lunchtime!”

“You’ll gain weight, not lose!”

“It’s unhealthy to skip a meal!”

This, friends, is one of many examples of the party line being comprised primarily of bullshit.

1. Skipping breakfast does not slow metabolism

The metabolism claim, made by the same folks who brought us “eat 12 small meals a day to keep that fat-burning fire STOKED!” is, in a word, ridiculous. Metabolism (let’s say resting metabolism, for simplicity’s sake) is the process whereby the foods we eat are broken down and the resulting molecules are converted into energy and waste. Metabolism is impacted significantly and over the long term by a small handful of factors. But here’s the kicker: all of the factors (sex, age, body composition) boil down to muscle mass. Men typically have more muscle than women, so they have a higher resting metabolism rate. As we age, our muscles naturally degenerate, so the younger we are the more muscle we have. ¹

Whether or not you skip a meal has zero impact on the number of calories your body burns long-term, unless, of course, you do a deadlift between swallows of omelet. Which, though it would rule, would make breakfast lengthy and awkward.

2. You will not eat twice as much at lunchtime

If you’re hungry enough to eat two times your normal lunch for having skipped breakfast, you were probably hungry at breakfast and, therefore, should have eaten it.

Wait. I think I just said something important: If you’re hungry in the morning, you should eat breakfast. If you’re not hungry in the morning, you should wait to eat until you are.

Let’s say you do skip it. You know you’re eventually going to get hungry, right? Great – have food available for when hunger strikes. When you skip breakfast, there’s a fair chance you’ll get hungry before lunchtime. Be prepared. Pack a meal. Rocket science, I know.

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3. Skipping breakfast will not make you gain weight

The Internet is absolutely  filthy  with sensational misinformation.

Why is there so much misinformation on the internet about nutrition, weight loss, and everything that relates to it? In a word: money. Starving freelance writers; thoughtless, deadline-driven editors; websites that need fresh content to drive traffic to pages in order to inspire advertisers to pay for space – surprise and sensationalism get clicks. If you read a headline that strikes you as odd, you’re more likely to click it. Something counter-intuitive, like “Skipping Breakfast Leads to Weight Gain” gets a lot more hits than the more mundane “Study Finds Most People Who Are Already a Healthy Weight Tend to Eat Breakfast as Part of Their Weight Maintenance Plan,” which is what actually happened and what’s getting misconstrued every time someone makes the Breakfast Claim .

If you’re eating in a way that nourishes you- and you’re not hungry in the morning – it’s perfectly fine to skip breakfast. Holding off on eating until you’re hungry will actually help you lose excess fat, since acting according to your body’s signals helps establish good rapport between your perhaps hitherto overfed & otherwise abused body and your mind.  Imagine if the popular advice was to take a dump every morning, no matter what, regardless of whether or not your body was ready. Doesn’t seem so smart, does it? Similarly, once you’ve freed yourself from the insulin cycle, if you’re body isn’t asking for an early morning meal, don’t force yourself to eat it.

4. You can lose weight healthily if you often, or even always, skip breakfast

Human evolution favored those who could store fat expeditiously during harvest time – those who packed on the pounds were more likely to survive the long, hard winter. What’s more, they had plenty of fat left over to help fuel them through the physically intense spring. We are descendants of grade-’A’ fat-storers, but the long, hard, calorie-deficient winter and physically demanding spring never arrive for most of us. Denied our annual period of fat loss (and thank god, because being cold and hungry sucks), we grow bigger and bigger with each passing season, year after year.  If we’re invested in bringing our bodies back into balance, we focus on eating the same foods that would’ve been available to most folks in the natural, annual period of fat loss.  Then, as on the cold prairie, the body naturally gets much of its energetic needs met from its extra stores of fat. Because the energy source is built in and the body is primarily burning fat instead of glucose, true hunger comes much less frequently and often hits much later in the day than most modern bodies, always craving a sugar hit. Is it any wonder why fruit, cereal, and bagels are among the most popular go-to breakfast foods?

When we eat to support the body’s return to a healthy weight, it’s typical to feel sated upon waking. When you wake sated, spend a few minutes planning out what you’ll have when the hunger naturally comes, and then do other things with that precious morning time, like check Facebook. Doh.