To breakfast or Not to breakfast. Image credit: shaunaforce

I received a lot of feedback after the posts 7 Reasons Why You Should NOT Eat Breakfast and 5 Reasons Why You Should Eat Breakfast.

• Positive feedback because I addressed myths regarding breakfast.
• Negative feedback because some assumed I was anti-breakfast.

To make sure there’s no confusion, quick recap on breakfast.

8 Nutrition Rules. After the last 2 posts, you might have been confused about 3 out of the 8 nutrition rules. Here’s why you should keep following them.

• Eat Breakfast. Because it helps building healthy eating habits: harder to eat junk food the rest of the day if you start with a healthy meal. It also helps weight gain: easier to eat more if you spread your calories.
• Eat Every 3hours. So you don’t end at the candy machine or overeat on the next meal because you got hungry. It also decreases stomach size because your meals are smaller. So you’ll feel full faster.
• Eat Protein With Each Meal. You need 1g of protein per pound of body-weight since you’re limiting your starchy carb intake. Otherwise meeting your caloric needs gets impossible. Also: protein blunts hunger.

Nothing Changes. The 8 nutrition rules still apply and will continue to apply. You should keep eating breakfast, eat every 3 hours, eat protein with each meal, … But NOT for the reasons they usually tell you. 3 myths debunked:

• Frequent Meals Don’t Increase Metabolism. Your body won’t burn more calories if you eat a meal every 3 hours. So you won’t burn more fat. The only way to increase your metabolism is to exercise and lose weight.
• Skipping Meals Doesn’t Decrease Your Metabolism. Breakfast doesn’t kickstart your metabolism because it never goes down when sleeping. It doesn’t even go down when fasting for up to 72h.
• You Don’t Lose Muscle If You Don’t Eat. Your body needs protein to build muscle. But starvation mode is a myth. As long as you do regular strength training, you won’t lose any muscle.

For research, check Eat Stop Eat, How Much Protein, Leangains, pubmed, … The research on this is fairly new and many coaches/nutritionists are updating their books based on it. Do not take mainstream advice for granted.

Why Does It Matter If Nothing Changes? Several months ago I experimented with Intermittent Fasting for the first time. First Eat Stop Eat, then I moved to Leangains‘ approach which I’m still on today.

Like many readers I’ve had great results with Intermittent Fasting. Especially in terms of productivity and hunger control. So far it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever go back to my old way of eating (8 nutrition rules).

This means you’ll most likely get articles on Intermittent Fasting in the future. The post 7 reasons you shouldn’t eat breakfast sets the foundation for these future posts since there are many myths regarding fasting.

I don’t believe that everyone who tries Intermittent Fasting will like it. But I do believe that anyone can adapt if you give it time.

Saying “I feel like crap when I skip breakfast” is like saying “I don’t look like Ivan Stoitsov but I’ve been doing StrongLifts 5×5 since 2 weeks”. Your body needs time to adapt. Especially if you ate breakfast daily for 15years like I did.

By the way: Intermittent Fasting is not a way to make your life easier because you’re too lazy too cook. It’s also not a get-ripped-quick scheme. Build the habit of eating healthy consistently before you try it.

Please Read Articles Thoroughly. Not just the headlines and subheadings. In the post 7 reasons you shouldn’t eat breakfast, I explained at the bottom why you should keep eating breakfast. So the confusion surprised me.

Read through this & this forum threads in the forum. There’s a lot of feedback coming from both sides. I’ve replied to questions too.

Remember to stay civil, constructive & open-minded. Disagreeing is fine. But say why/ask what you don’t understand/give your perspective. This way we can all learn from eachother.

Expect more about breakfast in the coming weeks. Click here to automatically get future articles in your mailbox or by RSS for free.

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.