Comment by ilitirit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilitirit | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had breakfast since about 2007. Well, of course there are days where I do have it when I'm staying over at a hotel, or I'm at an early work function. But I don't make breakfast for myself at home. My first meal is between 12h30 and 13h30. I don't feel any worse (or better) than when I used to eat breakfast in the past, but it's been so long that I really can't tell. I suppose this can be considered a type of fasting because of the length of time between lunch and supper the previous night.

I've never really understood the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day because I've never suffered from any ailments because not eating breakfast. Or maybe I have and I just don't know it? But then I could apply that same logic to times when I got inexplicably ill or just was not performing at my peak and I did have breakfast. My point is that I don't notice any significant changes in my health and or behaviour.

Of course I don't advise anyone doing this (or NOT doing - check with your physician first), but I still firmly believe that there is a lot of about diet and fitness that has to do with the physiology of the individual.

(BTW, if anyone else thought the linked article sounded familiar it might be because you've read it already. It was published 1 year ago)

I started to skip breakfast a few years ago. Now I skip lunch as well. Feel a lot better for it, don't lose energy, and don't get tired in the afternoon. I run everyday in the morning instead of breakfast, and cycle a lot.

If you eat around the same time daily, your body learns to get hungry when the time approaches. Regular breakfast-eaters get hungry if they skip breakfast, while breakfast-skippers like you and me do not. (If I'm wrong and someone in normal health has tried skipping breakfast for a few days without losing the morning hunger -- assuming they're making up for it later in the day -- I'd like to hear about it.)

I started skipping breakfast not for intermittent-fasting benefits but in hopes of better sleep: the anticipatory appetite can contribute to waking up early, and my sleep needed help.

Added: the article supports this. "The rise in ghrelin is independent of meal timing as demonstrated by similar peaks before an anticipated meal in various meal frequencies, thus suggesting that subjective feelings of hunger and energy intake is highly dependent on the individual’s preferred meal pattern (76)."

> I've never really understood the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day...

I've always heard that you should have the most calories and greatest diversity of food at the first meal of the day, slightly less so at the midday meal, and a very light/low calorie dinner. This is supposedly because you need that huge energy and mental boost to get your day started, and as the day goes on your caloric intake should taper off as you won't need it as much by the time you get home from work, and a light dinner because within a few hours you'll be sleeping and won't need it either.

Now that being said, it wouldn't work for me. I am up around 6-6:30am, I have breakfast (when I do eat it) at 7:15-7:30am, and my morning at work is decidedly not busy nor does it require critical thinking (I'm basically stuck answering the sales lines in the morning as the rest of the team doesn't roll into work until nearly lunchtime). This is off-season, so I might get ten calls before lunch, and about half of those are non-productive. I take an early lunch, around 11:30am, so I'm available for the larger part of the afternoon. So, the time between breakfast and lunch is usually four hours. That's not enough time to fully digest a large breakfast and be hungry again, so I usually either eat a light breakfast or none at all.

What I've found is that if I eat small meals for breakfast and lunch, with a snack available should I need it in the mid afternoon, I tend to focus better and get more done. The only downside is that by the time I get home and finish cooking dinner, I'm ravenous and I end up eating way too much for that meal. That's the part I'm trying to focus on now and cut down to about half. This will put my overall caloric intake at less than the "maintain" level for my build and age, which will hopefully help me to slowly lose weight.

> I've always heard that you should have the most calories and greatest diversity of food at the first meal of the day, slightly less so at the midday meal, and a very light/low calorie dinner.

This theory seems to ignore how effectively we can run on glycogen reserves, and sounds like it assumes a full night of sleeping takes less energy than a few hours awake. Also, most nutrients don't need to be consumed just before you're most active; the body can figure out when to use what, and a lot of resources go more to "repair/maintenance" than "fuel".

My eating schedule is kind of similar, in that I also eat my first meal around 12:00, but that's also close to when I wake up. I stay up until around 3am most nights, and I usually only eat lunch and dinner (technically breakfast and lunch?). I think this works really well for me. I'm often "in the zone" late at night and don't think about eating. I'm working remotely from Thailand, so I get to have a bit more overlap with co-founders and clients in the US. And I'm a night owl anyway, regardless of my timezone.

I don't know about the long-term side effects of this sleep schedule, but I'm lucky that I have the freedom to sleep as long as I want.

A side-note: Breakfast food is the best food! Nothing wrong with bacon and eggs for dinner. And sometimes I have cereal for lunch.

I started skipping breakfast in elementary school and haven't been eating it at all since then, no issues whatsoever for me and I actually prefer working out fasted.

I don't even get hungry before 1-3pm so I always found it odd when people couldn't function without a breakfast.

Following IF makes it easier to follow a diet since you only have 8h or less to eat all of them.

I started doing the same thing and lost 30 lbs pretty quickly. At times I just eat one very large meal per day. I've found it much easier to control my appetite and make better choices by exercising a little bit of discipline every day this way. Apparently some Romans idealized eating once per day.

I normally don't have any breakfast either, just because I prefer to spend extra time in bed in the mornings.

This haven't prevented me from gaining weight though. So just skipping breakfasts in the long term wouldn't be enough.

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