Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight | Hacker News Reader

Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight

washingtonpost.com

35 pointstakee64 comments

The more interesting question I think is not whether skipping breakfast might help lose weight, it is whether the weight loss is due to lower overall caloric intake, the timing of digestion reducing bioavailability, the timing of when sugar became available to the body impacting targeted fat burn or somehow enhancing the body's ability to burn fat cells, or maybe the types of "breakfast" foods skipped, or just general impact on dietary choices,... or maybe it was...

Obviously I think the study is asking too high-level a question, and barely skimming the surface of how things work. Feels like the same sort of thinking that produced the alternative finding.

In an interview with Ryan Carson, he mentioned that he eats something as soon as he gets up to kick off his body's metabolism.

This seems logical, but like all nutrition-related things, there's an obvious counter argument, and no good science to tell you which is correct.

Honestly, I think it is a mix of glycemic index being affected by the longer fast and eating less. As I stated in my response below, my experience has been that the fewer meals I eat, the less I overeat.

I know that last statement isn't anything groundbreaking, but if you can get through the initial hunger created by changing your eating schedule, it can be hugely beneficial to limiting your caloric intake.

The more interesting question I think is not whether skipping breakfast might help lose weight, it is whether the weight loss is due to lower overall caloric intake

It is overall caloric intake. This link [1] has 20 studies cited that support this hypothesis. At the same time, I'm not aware of any clinically controlled studies that contradict this hypothesis.

The doubt always comes from the studies where caloric intake is assessed by questionnaires and self reporting, which in turn was shown to be very inaccurate, i.e. [2].

[1] http://examine.com/faq/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-loss.htm...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084

At the end of the day it will always be calories in vs. calories out.

My personal experience is that I try to only eat 1 meal per day. Intermittent fasting is nothing new, and when I combine it with a low carb diet, it is extremely effective for me. I went from ~300 down to 225 in a matter of 4-5 months.

As long as I am busy, I hardly notice any hunger during the day now that I am used to the schedule and the 1 meal makes it much harder to over eat. 2000 calories is extremely hard to take in all at once, so it basically puts you at quite a deficit just due to the logistics of eating that quantity of food in a small window of time.

What do you eat and when do you eat it?

It doesn't matter if you're not doing a calorie deficit.

It doesn't matter for weight loss but it matters a lot for managing hunger, which for many people is a critical part of losing weight sustainably.

So most of my meals are very bachelor-like. Cook some sort of protein(chicken/steak/fish) or eggs/meat/cheese in a pan on the stove and then an entire steamable bag of frozen veggies of some sort. If I want to get really fancy I will do either a stir fry or beef/turkey chili with some veggies/beans mixed in. Depending on how busy I am during the day this can be anywhere from 4-8 pm.

If I have hunger issues later on I will drink cold water or unsweetened vanilla almond milk (It's crazy, IIRC, an entire half gallon is only 200 calories).

Cashew milk is similarly low-calorie.

I do something similar, two meals targeting 1,000 apiece. That means each meal can be a huge variety of things, even eating out where you wouldn't normally consider eating while pursuing weight loss, such as Chipotle. It's been very successful and my family thinks I'm on drugs with how quickly I've been losing weight.

Like you, hunger sucked at the beginning, but now I never even notice it.

My go to with Chipotle is to get a bowl w/ fajita veggies subbed for rice and beans, double barbacoa, cheese, lettuce, hot salsa and sour cream. I will eat what I can and then mix the leftovers with eggs the following day.

Yeah, the bowl is the trick, even with the double protein. When I tell people the tortilla is 300 calories alone they universally gasp and refuse to believe me.

Also look at a caloric intake / use over a larger moving window. The notion that our body functions on a daily unit of time is artificial. If you look at a larger window, managing a diet becomes easier.

> At the end of the day it will always be calories in vs. calories out.

This is based on the assumption that all calories are digested and metabolized.

Calorie is simply a unit of energy. There are calories in paper, charcoal and wood, so taking that to the extreme would mean that one would gain the same amount of weight consuming a bunch of shredded paper as consuming, let's say, a donut, yet digestion does not work that way.

At that point I would imagine it's the same concept as net carbs. Obviously not all food/matter is digestible. I do think it's still safe to say calories in/calories out however since most of us aren't entering shredded paper, charcoal and wood into MFP logs.

While you can control the input, the output gets harder - one cannot just simply double/triple their defecation rate, and exercise tends to work out an appetite.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/exercising-but-gain...

Output is governed by hormones, and the only reliable hack for now seems to be significantly lowering insulin by switching to ketogenic diet (or a variation thereof, /r/zerocarb, /r/keto, Atkins, Dukan). I'd recommend this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Calories,_Bad_Calories with understanding that a lot of nutrition and diet science is in very premature stage because of World War 2 and lack of funding thereafter.

I once read that different kinds of food deliver calories in forms with different degrees of absorb-ability.

Source: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/why-most-food-...

A couple of thoughts:

It's worth noting that both of the breakfasts in the study were high in high-glycemic carbohydrates. It would be interesting to see if the result holds when eating something like eggs and bacon for breakfast.

Second, since most people fast overnight, you get the double whammy of low insulin (making fat cells more willing to give up stored energy) and a caloric deficit in the morning. It seems plausible that extending the period of time when that is the case would result in fat loss.

I've personally had pretty good luck (~34.5" to ~32.5" waist measurement over a couple of weeks) with eliminating most carbohydrates between about 5PM and 10AM.

This is why it's hard to take the field of nutrition seriously.

"New study finds peach fuzz makes you lose weight"

5 years later

"New study finds peach fuzz makes you gain weight"

Did you read the study? Or did you just read the report about the study?

I'm not criticizing the study, but rather lamenting the constantly-shifting landscape that is the field of nutrition. Every few weeks or months, a new study comes out claiming that everything we knew about nutrition before was wrong.

It is profoundly discouraging for a lot of people.

This usually has little to do with the field of nutrition or the studies themselves. It has to do with how the media reports the findings of the studies, usually without properly understanding them and without putting them into context. Everything has to be revolutionary, has to prove everything else wrong, even though it's extremely difficult to perform a valid scientific study that proves anything wrong.

My wife has a long-time friend who became a nutritionist, and she'll tell anyone that will listen that most people have a pretty good idea of how to eat right if they don't over-think it, but it becomes very difficult to put it into practice, because everything we do to make food convenient tends to also make it bad for us. Another issue is that medical doctors don't take nutritionists seriously (despite medicine also being a constantly-shifting landscape), and rarely pay attention to diet for anything other than controlling your weight, blood sugar, and cholesterol. This is why we end up with things like "Irritable Bowel Syndrome", which, for most people is likely an undiagnosed food intolerance (and given the most common ingredients in processed foods, it's probably soy or lactose).

How do you know the studies say those things if you don't read the studies?

Is nutrition bunk, or is reporting on nutrition just very bad?

There's a bunch of things that make nutrition science weird:

1) everyone feels free to talk about it as if they know what they're talking about. You see this on HN. You see this on any forum. But you also have frauds like "Dr" Gillian McKieth (once popular TV / book nutritionist) who put out vast quantities of bullshit information.

2) huge multinational companies engage in well-funded dis-information campaigns to discredit scientists. They do this to avoid increased prices through taxation.

3) science reporting is almost entirely terrible. Those studies don't usually make these grandiose claims. Idiot news paper reporters make the grand claims.

4) researchers can't run real experiments. Most of the science comes from self-reported uncontrolled case studies. Of course it's not going to be as good as a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.

Yeah. Between nutritionists and economists it's hard to know who not to trust the most. Nearly everything we were told as children about what constitutes healthy eating turned out to be wrong - it's no surprise obesity is such a problem.

Studies have shown that overweight people don't necessarily eat more calories or have less active lifestyles than their normal weight peers [1][2][3][4].

A major factor that contributes to excess weight is the absorption rate of dietary lipids in the gut, which can be influenced by anatomy, gut microbiota, genetics, and other characteristics [5][6][7][8][9]. The rate at which the body absorbs fat from food during digestion plays a key role.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24527563

[2] http://www.livescience.com/23057-overweight-teens-kids-calor...

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22006481

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23320866

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3601187/

[6] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/the-food-figh...

[7] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...

[8] http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/296/6/E1183.short

[9] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3213306/

Studies have shown that overweight people don't necessarily eat more calories or have less active lifestyles than their normal weight peers [1][2][3][4].

These appear to be observational studies based on self reporting. There are multiple studies that showed overweight people underreporting their caloric intake by up to 50%. Interestingly, people with normal and less than normal weight ofter overestimate their caloric intake, such as [1].

There are enough clinically controlled studies done that prove that caloric intake is the primary determinant of weight.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084

The accuracy of self-reported energy intake using the 24-hour daily recall method has been shown to be consistent across BMI levels:

"Accuracy of recall was not related to body mass index in that the obese men recalled food intake as accurately as the nonobese men." [1]

Accelerometers were used in the Chinese study to measure physical activity:

"No differences in PA [physical activity] and SB [sedentary behavior] were found across different BMI categories." [2]

A European study where the childrens' parents were doing the reporting rather than the subjects themselves concluded:

"The data suggest the belief that overweight children eat more than non-overweight children is not correct." [3]

Studies on identical twins showed that caloric intake didn't account for differences in weight between twins. Specific types of gut bacteria present in low-weight individuals were found to have a protective effect against obesity however. [4][5]

There is little difference between the energy intake of most overweight people and their normal weight counterparts. Factors like gut biology and intestinal absorption play a much more important role.

The Nutrition Science Initiative was developed to address the need for more clinical research in this area. [6]

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15054345

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11753586

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24527563

[4] http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Myth-Science-Behind/dp/029760...

[5] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141106132204.ht...

[6] http://www.wired.com/2014/08/what-makes-us-fat/

The accuracy of self-reported energy intake using the 24-hour daily recall method has been shown to be consistent across BMI levels:

CONCLUSIONS: Under controlled conditions, the USDA five-step multiple-pass method can

Yes. We need controlled conditions.

"No differences in PA [physical activity] and SB [sedentary behavior] were found across different BMI categories." [2]

The parents of children recorded dietary intake for a week using the food weighing method.

No. Please let the scientists weigh the food under controlled conditions.

A European study where the childrens' parents were doing the reporting rather than the subjects themselves concluded:

No. Please let the scientists weigh the food under controlled conditions.

Studies on identical twins showed that caloric intake didn't account for differences in weight between twins.

The ScienceDaily link does not give much relevant information. So they found sets of twins whose weight differs, and the gut bacteria composition differs. Interesting. What did they do next to disprove that caloric input determines body weight? Did they assign twins to certain diets to see how body weight changes? No, and the word "calorie" is not even mentioned at all.

In fact, all I get from the article is correlation - lack or presence of certain types of bacteria is correlated with body weight. Here's an easy possible confounder: what if lack or presence of bacteria increases or lowers the appetite, causing caloric intake to change and thus leading to weight gain or loss?

The Nutrition Science Initiative was developed to address the need for more clinical research in this area. [6]

Yes. As long as all food is measured by the scientists and there is no possibility the participants are getting extra food elswere, or not eating what they are supposed to eat, I'm very eager to see the results.

Losing weight comes down to a pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is a calorie deficit. It's simple science and fact that eating less calories than your maintenance calories (basal metabolic rate) will cause you to lose weight. Once you tackle that, you can move up the pyramid and fine tune to maximize the weight loss by incorporating tactics such as meal timing, quality of ingredients, types of food eaten, or different macronutrient percentages. But without the bottom of the pyramid, there can't be anything on top.

I guess it's trivial what you say about calorie deficit but the trick is how to not devour that tasty something that you know is there in your fridge when your plan to eat less for a few seconds is only your second priority.

Humans get hungry after 4h of not eating with exception of when we sleep. So less sleep results in more craving for food but eating a ton, minutes after waking up results in hunger 4h later.

I wake up … with an appetite but usually don't crave for food for some hours, so that's a good chance to if not skip then at least delay a meal, so hopefully that day you go to bed with just two meals.

The opposite worst thing you can do is to stay up just a little longer to eat on your way to bed.

The first trick is to not have that thing in your fridge, and I know as much as anyone how hard that trick can be to pull off (one helpful part is to go to the store after you eat). In fact, the only quick meal/snack I tend to have on hand is oatmeal (or occasionally yogurt).

I regularly eat 10-12 hours after I wake up, and rarely feel hungry before I hit the 10 hour mark, unless I make a habit of eating during that time period. If I decide to follow a whim to eat breakfast on two or three consecutive weekdays, I will be hungry at breakfast time on the following day, regardless of what I ate the day before, or when I last ate. The worst part, though, is that it sometimes takes longer for that hunger to stop coming at breakfast time every day than it does to get it to start coming in the first place.

Something else that helps, for me, is to get at least some amount of exercise first thing in the morning. I take a short (~1.5 mile) bike ride over a fairly mild route (mostly flat or downhill) on most mornings (when it's not raining). In my unscientific observation, it kick-starts my metabolism, which it needs, since I'm definitely not getting exercise at work. After that, I primarily have to keep my mind busy, as boredom typically leads to eating just to do something.

> I guess it's trivial what you say about calorie deficit but the trick is how to not devour that tasty something that you know is there in your fridge when your plan to eat less for a few seconds is only your second priority.

I might be a bit extreme but I have no food in my fridge. I have flavored water (0 calories) and I drink that when I'm hungry. At noon I eat out. If I have food at home I eat too much so this is the only way that works for me :|

There's a 'natural/evolutionary' argument to be made in favor of skipping breakfast too: most animals do not store food and need to hunt or forage as and when hunger arises. This requires a certain amount of time and activity. So it's unlikely that animals have evolved a need to eat first thing in the morning.

Are you aware how broad a term "animals" is? The term includes hawks, ants, turtles, snakes, trout, leeches, sharks, jellyfish, lions, coral, alligators and many more. It includes all vertebrates, but it is not limited to vertebrates. The diversity of eating habits in animals defies easy generalizations. Maybe jellyfish do skip breakfast, but that does not tell you whether humans should skip breakfast.

You can find a natural/evolutionary argument (justification) for just about anything:

Animals don't store food and need to hunt or forage..., so the metabolism is reduced until the first meal to prevent excess consumption of stored fat resources.

Isn't starvation a more plausible danger in nature than dying of overconsumption?

But no-one really cares about weight - they care about body composition. That is key to understanding all of this, and it's missing from these results. Who cares if you lose weight if it's muscle wasting away? Who cares if your weight stays the same but you're losing fat and gaining heavier muscle?

But certainly they collected body composition data in the course of the study, it just doesn't make the headlines?

Yes, but I think it points out the major problem with health articles in general is that culturally many people have reduced improved health in the general sense to the mantra of "losing weight". Pretty soon people have internalized it, and reading a sensational attempt at summarizing legitimate scientific studies becomes just a token discarded atop of a huge pile of ideas that people used to temporary assuage the regret of being a slave to the hedonistic garden of delights manufactured for them by the food and entertainment industries.

Okay, maybe I'm laying it on a bit thick, but seriously I think every single person in America can come up with 5 no-brainer ways to improve their health that would move the needle more than trying to eke out some mass effect of eating breakfast or not, it's just that people want the easy fix, and frankly there really is none. We just don't have the genetics or the instincts to cope with the sedentary lifestyles we've created for ourselves, and the only way out of it is get serious and develop healthy habits one bit at a time.

Here's the study, despite the fact that the article didn't bother to cite it:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26101624

Seems to me that this study is almost entirely useless for forming the basis of any kind of diet or lifestyle advice because:

It was done over 4 weeks. Almost all controlled diet studies are conducted over short periods of time and are therefore useless as the basis of any long term lifestyle advice (if you want to make any difference to your long-term weight you need to make changes that span years, if not the rest of your life). This is almost inherent in diet studies, because most participants won't accept these kinds of things (skipping breakfast) or even eating a particular diet for long enough periods of time. Imagine as a participant being asked to skip breakfast for 2 years in order to give a decent study length. They're either going to refuse to participate, or have a significant chance of failing to comply with the requirements. This is the reason that so many long-term diet studies are observational (i.e. uncontrolled, just looking at what people do naturally). And observational studies can't be used to determine causality (did people who skipped breakfast lose weight, or were lighter people more likely to skip breakfast, for example).

The study is tiny. n=36 is right on the cusp of being so small as to not have any kind of statistical significance. Further, statistical significance is not the same as a significant effect. The effect size in this study is small. The n is small. So how can you use this as the basis for refuting an existing body of evidence? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This study does not qualify to invalidate the existing scientific consensus.

They did indeed collect body composition data. Have a look at the following table:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4473164/table/ta...

Now it might just be me, but it looks like what the no-breakfast group lost was fat-free mass. But then I would have thought the mean for fat-free mass and fat mass should add up to the overall mean for body weight, which it doesn't. So either I'm missing something or there's an error in the table.

Finally, check out "researcher degrees of freedom":

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/publishing-fals...

Overall, a tiny, weak study, with a single slightly statistically significant result being blown out of all proportion. Such is the state of science reporting these days.

I researched Yokozunas and here's my findings.

They skip breakfast every single day and exercise for at least 5 hours before breakfast.

After lunch, they sleep. With plenty food and no physical activity, the body converts the food to fat. Same thing happens after dinner - sleep.

Before electricity, people ate dinner before sun down. This left enough time for some digestion and burning of excess energy.

My conclusion:

Skipping a meal is a great idea. The question is when. I've decided that the best time to skip a meal is dinner - not breakfast. Or as I tell my friends, Sleep Hungry.

Edit:

Yokozunas in Japan have perfected the art of inputting normal sized people and outputting obese people. I figured doing the exact opposite is the key to weight loss.

Any success?

I'm not over weight. Just a beer belly I grew from college. It's reduced a lot. The only exercises I do are 5 measely sit ups in the morning and cycling at night (if I eat late to burn up the meal before sleep.)

A more reasonable conclusion on sumo wrestler lifestyles is to to not eat more than 10000 calories a day like they do! Total caloric intake is so much more important than meal timing.

The advice that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" is, as I recall, based on similar junk science. They looked at lots of kids, recorded how often they ate breakfast, then looked at how well they did in school.

The kids who ate breakfast did better in school. Yay, breakfast is good for you.

Or, possibly, the correlation between eating breakfast and doing well in school has another explanation. One possible explanation of the correlation is that kids who don't eat breakfast are poor, and the poor statistically dont do as well in school due to other factors.

Can you find this study? Many studies are dodgy, but I am incredulous the study was this much dodgy. How can the study observing grade not controlling for socioeconomic status ever pass the review?

During my sojourn with Her Majesty's Forces we were never permitted to skip breakfast. Never, regardless of the conditions or schedule.

Other meals could drift through the day but breakfast was fixed and immovable.

Not eating makes you lose weight. Doesn't matter when you eat, eating less, and eating better food (fresh, non-processed. If it doesn't run, grow on a tree/plant, or swim, don't eat it) will make you lose weight.

> Not eating makes you lose weight.

Exception being the cases when it doesn't http://bradpilon.com/weight-loss/fasting-for-weight-loss/can...

What he described in this article was not just fasting, but a sequence of fasting and non-fasting days. Of course, if you fast for a day, and the next day eat all the calories back and more, you will gain.

Instead of skipping the breakfast, try not to eat after sun-set. Trust me, you'll love the difference you'll see after a few months.

Disclaimer: I'm following this principle every single day from past 2 years.

Skipping breakfast is part of the "carb backloading" diet. Seems to work well.

You also have to lift weights of at least 70% of your max on a regular basis. It also has a single specific limit on carb intake for every body type.

Sleep is probably the best diet in existence.

I think it is more of a drink coffee lose weight argument.

Yes, not eating helps you lose weight.

I _never_ eat breakfast and I'm fat.

Interesting. How long between last and first meal?

(Apart from the individual case not being representative.)

usually eat at noon or after, then dinner. I don't snack, never eat sugar. I think it's because of the portions I eat :| alcohol might be for something as well.

It could be due to hormone imbalance, have you checked your thyroid and testosterone levels?

Not a bad idea.

1 bottle of beer is usually between 100 and 300 carrots, depending on what type of beer and how much alcohol is in it. Alcohol is a significant source of calories.

Have you tried not drinking for a few months?

The rule of thumb I've heard is that 1 pound of weight can be lost with a 3500 calorie deficit. If you drink between 10 and 30 beets a week, cutting beer could cause you to start losing weight.

carrots? beets? Thanks for the laughs, autocorrect.

I'm not going to touch the parent in case anyone else needs a laugh.

Eating less helps you lose weight. News at eleven. Seriously, how difficult is it to understand that? Once when I was in the US I had some pancakes for breakfast and on the side was a huge chunk of white mass that looked like a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I took a large bite and oh boy.. it was butter. Plain butter. That chunk alone was about half of the calorie need of an average young person. Oh, and then there was the maple sirup, chocolate, and artificially sweetened orange juice. No wonder the US is so obese.

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