Is breakfast necessary??

Necessary - YES
Awesome - YES
According to studies, breakfast truly is the most important meal of the day, it's what gets your metabolism hopping. 3oz protein and some fruits or veggies is a healthy way to a new day

Necessary - YES
Awesome - YES
According to studies, breakfast truly is the most important meal of the day, it's what gets your metabolism hopping. 3oz protein and some fruits or veggies is a healthy way to a new day

What studies?

WHY COULDN'T YOU LET THIS DIE!?!?!?!?!?!

Even just having a piece of fruit and some milk is better than nothing...your body needs to know when to start "burning" & if you don't give it anything to "burn" when you start your day, it'll tend to "hold on" to the calories/fat you give it a few hours later at lunch time...so, yes, technically you really SHOULD eat breakfast & it really DOES get your metabolism going...

I HATE eating in the morning, I'm not even remotely hungry when I get up. Is eating breakfast completely necessary for successful weight loss? Because I'd rather save calories for lunch lol. Any tips or suggestions for easy breakfasts would be much appreciated!
:yawn:

I am not an advocate of skipping breakfast despite this post. I AM an advocate of the individual finding the right aspects of dieting that are clearly personal preference, and utilizing those aspects to create the best long-term adherence possible.

That said, there seems to be a lot of sillyness going on in here.

First of all, note the quoted part above. The OP is asking if breakfast is necessary for weight loss.

All of these claims about breakfast boosting your metabolism aren't backed by anything substantial. In fact, can ANYONE find me any set of studies that show greater expenditure given equal calories and macronutrients but with different partitioning? Go ahead, I'll wait.

There's a few different things to address here. One of them is the concept of food increasing your metabolism and the other thing to address would be the effects of short term fasting on metabolic rate.

As far as feeding frequency goes, any time you eat, you are expending calories through various digestive means. In other words, there's an energy cost associated with eating and this cost is based on the macronutrient composition of foods and total calories.

Meal Frequency and Energy Balance.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9155494
...studies using whole-body calorimetry and doubly-labelled water to assess total 24 h energy expenditure find no difference between nibbling and gorging. Finally, with the exception of a single study, there is no evidence that weight loss on hypoenergetic regimens is altered by meal frequency...

Different macronutrients do have a different thermic effect, but if we are comparing different meal timing we keep macronutrient intake and calories constant and just vary the timing of the meal.

Increased meal frequency does not promote greater weight loss in subjects who were prescribed an 8-week equi-energetic energy-restricted diet.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19943985
...We conclude that increasing MF does not promote greater body weight loss under the conditions described in the present study.


Lyle McDonald's comments: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/meal-frequency-and-energy-balance-research-review.html
Steve Troutman's explanation: http://body-improvements.com/resources/eat/#frequency


Now, as far as "your body needs food, you've been sleeping for 10 hours!" or whatever the claim is.....

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2405717
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10837292

There's at least some research suggesting the opposite, see above.


Now in closing there's something quite important to remember, and msf pointed some of this out already:

There is research that shows a correlation between weight gain and skipping breakfast but it's specifically because some people who skip breakfast will end up over-compensating so to speak, and eating too many calories for the day. But it's not the skipping breakfast that made them gain weight, it was the overeating of calories.

As msf pointed out in a previous reply, there's a pretty significant difference between a population that controls intake (we are tracking on MFP) and a population that eats ad-libitum. If you're tracking intake, and you can see that skipping breakfast causes you to over-eat, then you should eat breakfast.



However, if you're like the OP in this thread who clearly does not want to eat breakfast due to preferential/lifestyle reasons, then she can freely do so and monitor total daily intake. If she's not overeating for the day, her breakfast skipping behavior is perfectly fine.

I think its the most important meal of the day. Keep your blood sugar from spiking. Any trainer or weight loss problem stresess eat your largest meals for breakfast and lunch. Light on dinner. I feel much better eating breakfast every morning and only been doing it regular for 2 months but see a difference in energy and ability to drink more water.

For everyone that says that breakfast 'kick starts your metabolism' or other such silliness, have you not noticed that there are numerous studies linked here that show that there is no metabolic impact of meal timing, calories and macros being equal. There is not a single credible source stating that it does. If it exists, I (and many others I am sure) would love to see them.

While one breakfast meal may not "kickstart your metabolism" in and of itself, the long term result of skipping breakfasts day after day and eating fewer meals per day is a higher liklihood of obesity. Anyone who makes an absolute statement like "There is not a single credible source stating that it does" obviously hasn't looked very hard.

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/most-important-meal
According to research, skipping meals, especially breakfast, can actually make weight control more difficult. Breakfast skippers tend to eat more food than usual at the next meal or nibble on high-calorie snacks to stave off hunger. Several studies suggest that people tend to accumulate more body fat when they eat fewer, larger meals than when they eat the same number of calories in smaller, more frequent meals. To teens, especially teenage girls, skipping breakfast may seem like a perfectly logical way to cut down on calories and lose weight. It's important for moms to educate their kids about the importance of the morning meal and the role it plays in maintaining good health and preventing obesity.

http://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/?p=1525
Cross sectional data from a large prospective study, the Seasonal Variation of Blood Cholesterol Study (SEASONS), also evaluated the relation between obesity and eating patterns. The study showed that subjects who regularly skipped breakfast had 4.5 times the risk of obesity as those who consumed breakfast regularly (95% CI 1.57-12.90) (2).

Eat breakfast. Your body hasn't eaten for 10-12 hours and it needs nourishment. You'll be more aware and awake, and you'll be less likely to overeat at lunch and dinner.

At least there is one reasonable minded person on the forums this morning.