The Importance of Eating Breakfast and Daytime Meals

Like our prehistoric ancestors, we have safety systems built into our genetic make-up. If we look at what happens if we skip breakfast or minimize lunch, hormones that have allowed us to draw on stored body tissue is affected in an area of the brain that controls appetite regulation. The result is very predictable, and everyone who has forgotten breakfast will probably recognize what happens next:

• We become increasingly preoccupied with thoughts of food from mid-afternoon onwards.
• We lose our ability to sense when we are comfortably full, and to stop eating before we are in fact stuffed.

These two changes in awareness translate into changes in appetite regulation that might play out as follows. Though you eat a good-sized dinner, you are still hungry an hour later. Even if you eat again, you feel the need to keep returning to the kitchen to graze throughout the evening. Ultimately, the calories eaten at dinner and during the evening are greater than those that would have been eaten at breakfast. In other words, skipping breakfast sets the stage for over-eating later in the day.

This inability to control eating later in the day is an almost universal response to having insufficient food early in the day. Once the body is forced to burn its own fuel when it is necessary to be alert and functional, subsequent overeating is inevitable. This response, which is "hard wired” into us, may have served our ancestors well, but it is making us overweight. The one sure way to help yourself gain control over this kind of eating is to eat a breakfast that contains about 20 percent of the calories you need for the day.

Thus, if you want to lose weight and then maintain weight you have to accept the importance of eating regularly throughout the day, beginning with breakfast.

The mechanisms that control food intake in animals, including humans, are complex. Sense data related to taste, smell, texture, and appearance influences eating behaviour. Energy use and storage also signal the brain to affect food intake. Finally, specialized chemo receptors in various sites throughout the gastrointestinal tract sense the presence of macronutrients such as fat and send messages to areas of the brain that control eating behaviour.

So, we are under chemical, genetic and behavioural control when it comes to eating. Trying to fight these influences are extremely difficult. One of the best and easiest ways to at least give us a fighting chance at successful weight loss is by eating breakfast, then eating regularly throughout the day.

Keep on trying, and don't ever give up. You can do it.
Dr. Doug