Eat Breakfast. Image credit: Maciej Dakowicz

Everyone says breakfast is the most important meal. Even the 8 nutrition rules recommend you to eat breakfast. But what if your instinct tells you to skip this meal. Should you force yourself to eat breakfast anyway?

Let’s see what the benefits of having breakfast are. Especially if your goal is fat loss or weight gain. This post will give you 5 reasons why you should build the habit of eating breakfast starting today.

1. Lose Fat. Eating breakfast won’t speed up your metabolism. Research shows fasting does not decrease your metabolism, neither do frequent meals increase it. But having breakfast does help fat loss by improving your diet.

• Less Binging. An unhealthy breakfast ruins your day: you’ll keep eating junk food thinking “tomorrow I eat healthy”. But a healthy breakfast sets the trend: you’ll want to continue eating healthy foods the whole day.
• More Healthy Food. The food you buy on your way to work usually isn’t healthy — although its label says so. By making breakfast yourself, you get control over the ingredients and thus over your results.

2. Gain Weight. To gain weight you must eat more. Hardgainers usually need at least 5000kcal/day to see weight gain. Eating breakfast is crucial to reach these amounts so you lose your skinny look forever.

• More Hunger. Breakfast usually makes you hungrier during the day. This makes weight gain easier since skinny guys often struggle to eat a lot.
• Less Bloating. The more meals you eat, the smaller these must be to reach your caloric needs. Meaning less nausea’s, less bloating, …

3. Build Healthy Eating Habits. As explained in point 1, starting your day with a healthy breakfast sets the trend: you won’t ruin the rest of your day with junk food if you begin it with a healthy meal.

Breakfast doesn’t benefit your health directly. Studies that claim otherwise are correlational. But breakfast is crucial to build healthy eating habits – like eating whole foods 90% of the time – which will eventually improve your health.

4. Save Money. Preparing breakfast is cheaper than buying foods on your way to work or school, foods that are often also unhealthy.

• Short-term. Healthy, whole, unprocessed food isn’t more expensive. If it is: you’re not doing it right. Read 20 ways to eat healthy on a budget.
• Long-term. Poor diet causes excess body fat and eventually heart diseases which is the top cause of death in developed countries.

5. Avoid Stress. What you do the 1st hour after you wake up sets the trend for your whole day. You’ll avoid stress by waking up earlier and eat breakfast.

• No Skipped Meals. No more stress because you couldn’t find something healthy to eat for breakfast in the grocery store on your way to work.
• No Rushing. No more stress because you woke up late again, didn’t had time to eat breakfast and now have to rush to make it in time for work.

So how do you build the habit of eating breakfast? Topic of a future article. To automatically get free updates, click here.

Breakfast. Image credit: Andreza Pinheiro.

I used to wake up, drink coffee and eat nothing until noon. I had nausea’s from having breakfast so I skipped it until I was about 14.

But this changed when I began going to school by bike. I always got sick cycling on an empty stomach: cold sweat broke out by the time I arrived at school and I threw up my coffee several times.

I thought skipping breakfast was the cause because everybody told me I should eat breakfast, it’s healthier. So I started to eat like an animal on waking up. And indeed: I no longer got sick when I went by bike to school.

15 years later, I’ve trained on an empty stomach many times without problems. I no longer get sick from training in a fasted state, although I train at higher intensities than I did at age 14. What happened?

I now believe my bad eating habits and being out of shape as a teenager were the causes. Because it turns out eating on waking up is not healthier. Here are 7 reasons why you should not have breakfast.

1. Breakfast Doesn’t Increase Your Metabolism. Studies show that fasting or less frequent meals don’t decrease your metabolism. And eating every 3 hours, including breakfast, doesn’t increase your metabolism neither.

People promoting Intermittent Fasting like Brad Pilon from Eat Stop Eat & Martin Berkhan from Leangains have shown the opposite is true: your metabolic rate increases slightly when you fast.

2. Breakfast Doesn’t Stop Muscle Breakdown. Starvation mode is a myth: you won’t lose muscle if you don’t eat every 3 hours — like when sleeping — and as long as you do regular exercise.

Your muscles also don’t need protein every 3 hours. Getting protein around your training seems to be more important than your total protein intake. Read Brad Pilon’s How Much Protein for solid research on topic.

3. Breakfast Doesn’t Manage Blood Sugar Well. The common advice is to have breakfast to raise your blood sugar and control your insulin levels. Insulin is key for muscle growth but is also responsible for fat storage.

Fasting reduces your insulin levels and increases insulin sensitivity dramatically more than eating small frequent meals do. People with diabetes have reported they managed their blood sugar better using Intermittent Fasting.

4. Breakfast Increases Hunger. Many people — including me — feel hungrier during the day after eating breakfast. This could be a benefit or a drawback, depending on whether you want to gain weight or lose fat.

• Great for Weight Gain. If you’re a skinny guy who struggles to eat a lot, eating breakfast will make it easier to reach your caloric needs.
• Not So Great for Fat Loss. Especially since more frequent meals don’t increase your metabolism. You’ll have to control your food choice, like starchy carb intake, to avoid fat gains. Follow the 8 nutrition rules.

5. Breakfast Is Not Healthier. People who don’t eat breakfast are usually the ones who don’t exercise and who grab a donut on their way to work, eat junk food at noon and a big dinner in front of the TV.

Breakfast doesn’t benefit your health directly, but helps building healthy eating habits. Studies claiming that breakfast is healthy are correlational.

• Breakfast does not manage blood sugar well.
• Breakfast does not increase your metabolism.
• Breakfast does not prevent muscle breakdown.
• Breakfast makes you hungrier the rest of the day.

6. Breakfast Impairs Concentration. Studies show fasting for 48 hours doesn’t impact cognitive tests negatively. You don’t need breakfast for mental alertness.

A lot of people, especially students, skip breakfast because they know they’ll be more productive, concentrated and motivated during the rest of the day as a result. I’ve experienced the same thing.

7. Breakfast Is Unnatural. Our ancestors probably didn’t eat large breakfasts: they’d have to hunt it first (unless we’re talking left-overs). Hunter-gather meal patterns with large dinners and little during the day seem more natural.

This could be why many people’s instinct is to skip breakfast. Some say cereal companies pushed the idea that breakfast is healthy for their own benefits.

No More Breakfast? Am I saying you should stop eating breakfast? Not if you struggle to eat whole foods 90% of the time. In this case you should learn to eat breakfast as it will help you build healthy eating habits.

But once you’ve been eating healthy 90% of the time for at least 1 year and depending on what your goal is, you could experiment with approaches like Intermittent Fasting. See how that works out for you.