Missing breakfast can actually cause weight gain and other health problems.

Missing breakfast can actually cause weight gain and other health problems. including weight gain, poor energy levels and even contribute towards heart disease. So what happens when you skip breakfast? You probably don’t notice much at all and may expect even to lose some weight. But the body is a complicated beast and, backed by the latest research, I will explain how you are more likely to actually gain weight, whilst also affecting your energy levels as well as contributing towards many health complaints.

Introduction

Eating or missing breakfast can affect a number of bodily functions that have a marked impact in a number of areas concerning your health. Your decision whether to eat breakfast or not affects your energy intake, energy expenditure and circulating insulin, glucose, and lipid concentrations. A new study has found that by missing this important meal will affect insulin sensitivity throughout the day particularly after any other meals, increase LDL cholesterol (the bad one), and upset energy expenditure due to disrupted blood glucose levels.

Your body likes balance

Firstly when you miss breakfast the body your body is in a state of flux. The body has not eaten for many hours and is now starting to expend energy. Your body naturally keeps a store of readily available energy but only in a limited supply. As you exhaust this supply your body is looking for other sources and expects you to be doing your part by supplying it with food. Without this support it will go into a state of imbalance. A lot of switching with metabolic pathways goes on and your hormones will be in a state of disharmony. Your body will want to strip the body of stored energy in order to feed the muscles, brain, heart and other organs which are now starting to fire on all cylinders. Opposing this natural desire, with the body in a pseudo-starved situation, is the need to go into an anabolic state in order to store fuel, not knowing when it will receive the next meal. Therefore any fuel that comes into the body will be stored, mostly as fat.

So if the reason you avoid breakfast is an attempt to lose weight. The first rule of any weight loss protocol is to create a balance. This balance is wholly individual, to which I will explain in great detail at another time. But the fact is, it is only when you find this balance that you can be successful in losing weight. Missing breakfast is one sure way to disrupt this balance.

Missing breakfast plays a large influence upon a major hormone, insulin. It is the only hormone the body has at its disposal that takes blood sugar into the cells for energy. Missing breakfast causes an abnormal rise in insulin levels after eating other meals during the day. The reason being is to rapidly replace cellular glucose (sugar), depleted through you not supplying the body any energy at the beginning of the day. This act of quickly getting blood sugar into cells can in turn lead to blood sugar dips by over compensating leading to drops in energy. This process can also lead to cravings which can further affect your health, mood swings which can affect all your friends, and internal oxidation which can affect your looks.

Cardiovacular health

Another proven fact with missing meals and in particular breakfast, your LDL levels rise substantially. This LDL (otherwise know as Low Density Lipoprotein) is the carrier of cholesterol to the arteries and can also increase inflammatory mediators. Cortisol was mentioned with the adrenals, but another of it’s functions is to affect the integrity of your artery lining. Cholesterol can protect these linings and is being supplied in quantity which can lead to a build up of artery cholesterol. This can lead to cardiovascular problems and other health issues.

Conclusion

So if you want to put weight on, feel like you have no energy, and increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, just keep avoiding breakfast! The body likes balance and will take a number of actions to maintain this. Short term this is not a problem, but over a period of time and coupled with other issues, it certainly can lead to health concerns. Great health is a matter of respecting this balance and so supplying our body with a correct environment and diet; and it starts with breakfast.

Check out: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/81/2/388