Years ago, possibly ten or more, a magazine recommended a book that you could only get in America; it was called simply ‘The Skinny’ “What every skinny knows about dieting but won’t tell you”. I HAD to have it. I managed to get it from Amazon and when it arrived I could not put it down until I had read it.
To write the book the authors had conducted a series of “skinny lunches”, inviting skinny women to lunch to find out what exercise they did and what they generally ate to stay slim. Each chapter of the book, there are lots of them and all fairly short and includes funny topics such as “What to do if you accidentally drink a full fat coke instead of diet coke” how much weight you can expect to lose or gain depending on life events – moving house, a divorce etc. As well as comprehensive calorie lists for fast food restaurant foods. One chapter was entitled “Breakfast”.
I was brought up on breakfast before school. No matter if I couldn’t really face it or want it, I had to eat a bowl of cereal before school. We were never allowed the sugary fun cereals that were always on TV when I was watching kids television. The most exciting it got was rice krispies! I had some kind of belief that bad things would happen if I didn’t eat my breakfast.
Then I started my famous “breakfast/tea diet” which I have written about in an earlier post, and I always began my day of starvation with a large bowl of cereal. During this time cereal was a bit of an obsession. I’d spend ages wandering up and down the cereal aisles, checking the fat content of any that I hadn’t tried before and fancied. It was just about the only food I could eat without guilt, without measuring out, just enjoying it.
Then I read ‘The Skinny’ which explained that there are no proven benefits to eating breakfast. The people who think if they don’t eat breakfast they will faint by 10am have probably never skipped breakfast to see if this was true. That not eating breakfast saved loads of calories that you could spend later when you were actually hungry and on something more worthwhile than a bowl of cardboard tasting cereal. This seemed to sink in with me, so when I stopped the “breakfast/tea diet” and followed a more calorie controlled Weight Watchers style of diet, if I could get away with skipping breakfast then I did. Firmly believing what I’d read in the ‘The Skinny’; that I was saving calories, it was an unnecessary meal. I was rarely hungry first thing in the morning so it wasn’t hard.
I did lose some weight following this method of not eating breakfast. But I was being very careful of what I did eat during the day. And the summer of my Atkins style of eating I never ate breakfast, but then I was not eating very much during the day and for my evening meal either. So what impact not eating breakfast had on my diet and weight loss at that time can’t really be gauged.
But since reading the book and going through a long phase of not eating breakfast it is a meal that I always struggle to eat, thinking I am saving myself calories by not eating it.
However, more recently people like Ian Marber, The Food Doctor, sometimes seen on Richard and Judy, advocates eating breakfast as part of his “10 Principles” for losing weight. It’s just that I never really feel hungry in the morning, but then having read through the CORE Plan in my Weight Watchers book I am thinking that maybe I think feeling hungry is feeling absolutely RAVENOUS, starving hungry, which is not the correct hunger to feel. The hunger scale makes for interesting reading; and in fact the more I read about Core and seeing the results that you can get from people in my Weight Watchers meeting, I am wondering whether trying a week on core would be worth a trial?
So this week I am going to make sure, as much as possible, that I eat my breakfast within an hour of waking up and see if that has any effect on my metabolism and weight loss. Has anyone else noticed whether eating breakfast or not eating this “most important meal of the day” has had any effect on their weight?
