It's a well-thought opinion that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, as the right choice will set you up for the morning and get you ready for anything. But if you're doing intermittent fasting, which involves not eating for a certain amount of hours overnight, you might be trying to avoid breakfast as soon as you wake up.
It can be hard to know which of these options is best for losing weight - and so to help people, diet guru Michael Mosley has delivered his verdict. Author of the hugely popular Fast 800 books, Michael has long been an advocate for sustainable weight loss, and has made an Instagram post surrounding breakfast being a key part of shedding the pounds.
Coventry Live reports that in the post, Michael said: "We are often told that eating a good breakfast is a simple way to control your weight. If you skip breakfast, then you will get hungry later in the day and snack on high calorie junk food. Eating breakfast revs up your metabolism, preparing you for the day. It seems a plausible suggestion but is it true?"
Explaining the theory further in a blog post, he wrote: "To test this idea researchers got 300 overweight volunteers and asked those who normally skip breakfast to eat breakfast, while those who routinely ate breakfast were asked to skip it. They weighed the volunteers beforehand and 16 weeks later."
"So what actually happened? Well, the breakfast skippers who had made themselves eat breakfast lost an average of 0.76kgs. While the breakfast eaters, who had spent 16 weeks skipping breakfast, lost an almost identical amount, an average of 0.71kgs."
Researchers confirmed that the recommendation to eat breakfast "had no discernible effect on weight loss in free-living adults who were attempting to lose weight." If you find you snack less throughout the day after eating a healthy breakfast, then you should still go for it.
Dr Mosley eats breakfast every day, but there's something you can do in addition that may help you to lose weight. Speaking to the Daily Mail last year, he said: "When you get up in the morning, you may be in a rush to tuck into your breakfast and get out of the door. Or you may be happy to hold off eating for a while (a lot of people find they don't get hungry until later in the day).
"One reason why you might want to delay breakfast if you're not ravenous is that, by doing so, you will be extending your overnight fast (i.e. how long it has been since your last meal)."
Dr Mosley suggests to go with whatever works for you and not to feel guilty if you do not have breakfast - but try to avoid indulging later in the day if that's the case.
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