Breakfasts for Diet Success

A healthy breakfast will boost your energy and help you lose weight.

By Norine Dworkin:

Think you'll skip breakfast this morning so you can splurge on holiday goodies later and avoid some weight gain? Not so fast.

"This strategy invariably backfires," says David Katz, MD, associate clinical professor of public health and medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, in New Haven, Connecticut, and author of The Way to Eat (Sourcebooks, 2002). "It triggers the 'primal fear of hunger response.' Throughout most of human history, being without food was a threat to survival, so when food was plentiful, we'd overcompensate for the lean times. It's built into our genes. If you go without eating, particularly around the holidays, and you wind up in front of a sumptuous spread, in the span of an hour or less, you'll eat more calories than you should have had all day long."

Eating a good breakfast does more than cut the risk of bingeing later on -- it revs up your metabolism, provides energy for your body and brain, and is a key strategy for weight loss and maintenance.

"As the word implies, it really is breaking a fast when the body wakes up empty," says Leslie Bonci, a registered dietitian and director of sports nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Among participants in the National Weight Control Registry, an ongoing study of more than 4,000 people who've lost a minimum of 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year, 80 percent are regular breakfast eaters. Meanwhile, other research shows breakfast skippers have 4.5 times the risk for obesity.

A study at the University of Texas at El Paso found that people who ate a substantial breakfast consumed an average of 100 fewer calories a day than when they didn't eat breakfast. Though that may not sound like much, over a year it could mean a 10-pound weight loss.

Breakfast also seems to blunt the effects of hormones that contribute to weight gain. A 2002 Welsh study found an association between eating breakfast cereal and lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that stokes appetite and promotes dangerous fat accumulation around the belly.
(Take by: Ladies home journal)