Weight Loss Mantra or Myth?
You should “. . . eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.” Right? A new study out of Munich is making us take another look at the breakfast question. Granted the importance of the first meal of the day, if we want to lose weight—should we eat a big breakfast? Or a skimpy one? Or should we skip it altogether?
Traditional thought says that a big breakfast gets us set for the rest of the day and we tend not to eat as much at the other meals. Not so, say the German researchers’ findings. Subjects in the study, whether of normal weight or obese, seemed to eat the same amount for lunch and dinner, regardless of the size of their breakfast. Asked to vary the amount of food they had for breakfast from no food at all to a large amount, they then kept track in a journal of everything they ate. The only difference noted was that a mid-morning snack was more likely skipped if the person ate a large breakfast. Bottom line: the common advice of experts still stands when you’re trying to lose weight: decrease the number of calories you take in, increase your physical activity, and work for a better balance in these two. (Of course, eating more healthful foods can’t hurt.)