There has been a lot of research on how eating breakfast prevents weight gain. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day for many reasons and yet people underestimate its importance.

Breakfast Prevents Weight Gain

An interesting study was published in the Journal Obesity in 2007. Researchers wanted to investigate if there was a link between eating breakfast and long-term weight gain. The researchers evaluated data on 20,064 U.S men who were between 46 to 81 years of age. These men participated in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The researchers examined weight gain during 10 years of follow-up.

The researchers confirmed what earlier studies had found. Men who ate breakfast had a lower weight gain as compared to those who did not. Eating breakfast had this effect irrespective of the participant’s lifestyle or starting BMI. It also had a more pronounced effect on controlling weight gain in men when their BMI was less than 25.

The researchers concluded that eating breakfast may modestly contribute to the prevention of weight gain as compared to skipping it all together.

Getting Out of the Fasted State

Breakfast plays an important role in getting you out of the fasted state. Dinner is the last meal for most people. There could be a 9 to 12 hour gap between dinner and breakfast. During this time, the body is in a semi-fasted state. Your body’s glycogen levels would be low. The body needs the nutrients and energy to start cranking again.

Skipping breakfast could send the wrong signals to your body. Your body could think that there is a lack of food and this might activate the body’s starvation response. Once the body’s starvation response is activated, it wants to hold on to your fat reserves. It would also probably cause the calories from lunch to be stored as fat.

Anyone serious about healthy weight loss should make breakfast the most important meal of the day. This is one very simple way that you can help your weight loss without much effort.