It’s commonly said – and I fully endorse this – that
people who eat breakfast tend to have better weight control than people who
don’t.
So it’s news, I guess, that a smallish study (309
people, divided into 3 groups) which lasted 16 weeks (short, in other words)
and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded
that the people who ate breakfast lost no more weight over the course of 4
months than did the people who skipped this meal.
But . . .
As I said, it’s a small study
over a short period of time and no one should ever change their habits based on
this kind of sampling.
Plus, this conclusion flies in
the face of numerous surveys with large cohorts that have found that those
people who have lost a lot of weight and have kept that weight off for many
months (and years) nearly invariably claim that eating a good breakfast is one
of the keys to losing their weight and even more important, to maintaining that
weight loss.
Pretty easy to see why: a good
breakfast puts you in a better mood (haven’t seen it but I’m willing to bet
that a study would find that there’s a direct link between how crabby someone
is at 11 AM and what they ate – or didn’t – for breakfast that day); it gives
you a shot of energy so that you might actually do the exercise that you know
you’re supposed to be early enough in the day so that you don’t get overwhelmed
with excuses to put it off; and it very likely primes your metabolism in a
healthier direction than fasting does.
