Get thin by eating big breakfasts!

In an earlier post, I wrote that the old saw “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” was created by Kellog as a way to promote his breakfast cereals. In that same post, I said that research had shown that skipping breakfast does not promote weight gain. Now, I discover that making breakfast the biggest meal of the day has all kinds of health and weight benefits.

A study of 50,000 Seventh Day Adventists over seven years showed that you’re better off eating big breakfasts, then tapering off to a small lunch and light dinner—or no dinner at all. The people who ate their largest meal early in the day were more likely to have a lower body mass index (BMI) than those who ate a big lunch or dinner. Those with the lowest BMI finished lunch by early afternoon and did not eat again until the next morning—that is, they fasted for 18 or 19 hours.

In another study, obese and overweight women were all put on an identical 1,400-calorie-a-day diets. Half the women ate most of their calories at breakfast and half ate most of them at dinner. Those who ate the large meal in the morning lost two and a half times as much weight as those eating a large dinner. Plus they lost more body fat and had better glucose levels. One researcher notes, “We observed that the time of the meal is more important than what you eat and how much you eat.”

Our bodies are built to feast and fast. (See my post on fasting.) For one thing, the digestive process and the action of insulin are at peak performance early in the day. That is, our bodies use the nutrients most efficiently at that point. At night, your pancreas is literally sleeping. So if you eat late at night, you don’t have enough insulin to handle the glucose, and your blood glucose stays high up to three hours. It’s called “evening diabetes.”

All very convincing, but tough to pull off. Can you imagine eating a huge meal in the morning? And what happens to cocktail hour?

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