Fact or Fiction: Eating Breakfast Can Help You Lose Weight

Eating breakfast can be a wonderful cornerstone to your diet or it can ruin it, depending on the type of breakfast you eat. Here are some facts about how eating your breakfast can help your weight loss plan.

Eating Breakfast Gives Your Metabolism a Boost

Maintaining a good metabolism is an important part of long term weight loss. After a night without eating, your body is in a mild fasting state, as it would be if no food was available. If you don't eat until lunch time, that can be up to 18 hours without food. For the entire morning, instead of working at peak rates and burning off more calories, your body will be trying to conserve everything it can. Eating a healthy breakfast will speed up your metabolism and make it work harder. You would be better off cutting calories by eating smaller lunch and dinner meals than by cutting out breakfast. In fact, studies following people who have lost weight and kept it off for more than a year show that 80 percent of them include breakfast in their eating plans.

Eating Breakfast Increases Energy Levels

Studies have shown that children who eat breakfast in the morning are less tired and irritable during the day, perform better on tests and have longer attention spans. The same holds true for adults. Eating breakfast will allow you to be more active during the day, increase your energy levels and give you more chances to burn calories. You're more likely to go for a run if you don't feel exhausted all day.

The Type of Breakfast is Important

The foods you eat at breakfast are very important for weight loss. The right kind can keep you satiated and energized for the whole morning, and make it less likely that you'll splurge on treats later on. The wrong kind can leave you feeling hungry sooner and cause peaks in blood sugar, or add unnecessary fat to your diet.

Lean protein is the best food choice for breakfast, particularly eggs. Low fat yogurt, ricotta cheese or lean ham are other good options. Fruit and whole grain toast or cereal, or oats are excellent food choices as well. Preferably your breakfast will be a combination of lean protein and complex carbohydrates, like boiled eggs on whole grain toast. This is a low fat, low GI (glycemic index) meal that will slowly release energy during the morning, rather than all at once, leaving you hungry again. Sugary cereals or white flour pancakes may leave you hungry again quickly, and high fat meals like fried eggs and bacon may cause you to gain weight from too many calories.

Eating a healthy, low fat and low GI breakfast is the best option when it comes to losing weight. Eating breakfast will help you to lose weight and is a much better choice than skipping the meal, which will leave you tired, and may cause you to overcompensate with forbidden foods later in the day.

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