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Home » Long Term Weight Loss » Why breakfast should be your biggest meal – Mother Nature Network

When it comes to losing weight, maybe we should pay more attention to the numbers on the clock than the numbers on the nutrition label.

A new study published in the Journal of Nutrition found that people who ate their largest meal earlier in the day were more likely to have a lower body mass index (BMI) than people who consumed their biggest meal toward the end of the day.

Now, we've all heard the cliche that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Most of us have probably heard how eating breakfast can help you lose weight. But this research is saying something different. It shows that consuming more of our calories at the start of the day and fewer at the end boosts metabolism, prevents obesity and reduces risk of heart disease by lowering blood pressure and cholesterol.

This is the opposite of how many of us eat, researchers say. We have a tendency to grab something small on the way to the office and sit down to a big dinner at night.

Though the study was small an observational study of 50,000 adults who are Seventh Day Adventists, a religious group that tends to have very healthy habits it offered a peek into the weight-loss benefits of fasting, too. The lowest BMIs were found in the 8 percent of study participants who ate in the mornings and sometimes early afternoons before fasting for the next 18 hours.

As the New York Times reports:

The new study may explain why previous studies like this 2014 one, which countered the widely held belief that eating breakfast helped with weight loss, found that skipping breakfast had "no discernible effect on weight loss in free-living adults who were attempting to lose weight." Perhaps study participants were eating too late in the day; a person eating the same meal at different times of day might deposit more fat after an evening meal than a morning meal, Kahleova told the Times.

Go ahead and fill up at the breakfast table. Eating bigger meals earlier in the day rather than later may be better for long-term weight loss. (Photo: wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock)

Medical research seems to be trending in this direction. In January, the American Heart Association issued a scientific statement on how meal planning can affect our heart health.

Meal timing may affect health due to its impact on the bodys internal clock. In animal studies, it appears that when animals receive food while in an inactive phase, such as when they are sleeping, their internal clocks are reset in a way that can alter nutrient metabolism, resulting in greater weight gain, insulin resistance and inflammation, said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, Ph.D., an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University in New York City and one of the statement's authors.

So go ahead and sit down to a hearty breakfast. Those of us who eat breakfast each day are less likely to have high cholesterol and blood pressure, and people who skip a morning meal (which is 20 percent to 30 percent of U.S. adults) are more likely to be obese or diabetic, St-Onge said.

We suggest eating mindfully, by paying attention to planning both what you eat and when you eat meals and snacks, to combat emotional eating. Many people find that emotions can trigger eating episodes when they are not hungry, which often leads to eating too many calories from foods that have low nutritional value, according to St-Onge.

Angela Nelson ( @bostonangela ) is an exhausted mom of two young daughters and two old cats, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning digital editor with more than 15 years of experience delivering news and information to audiences worldwide.

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Why breakfast should be your biggest meal - Mother Nature Network

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Home » Long Term Weight Loss » Why breakfast should be your biggest meal – Mother Nature Network