Can a big breakfast help you lose weight?

A study has found that eating a big breakfast may help you to lose weight.  By eating 50% of the food you would eat over a whole day at day at breakfast, participants in the study lost more weight than those cutting back on carbohydrates

The study compared people on a low carbohydrate diet to those on a diet containing more calories, but with half the total days worth of calories consumed at breakfast.

While the low carbohydrate diet showed faster results than the big breakfast diet, over the 8 month period the big breakfast group lost significantly more weight in the long term.  The big breakfast diet group had lost on average 18 kg while the low carbohydrate group had lost 12.8kg by four months, but regained 8.2 kg by the eight month mark.

So the saying ‘breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper’ may actually hold true for effective long term weight loss.

Both diets were reduced calorie diets.  If those on the low carbohydrate diet could not maintain eating very little carbohydrate (which is very difficult to do!) in the long term, the weight loss effects would have been reversed as their bodies switched into storing all extra carbohydrate as fat.

For those eating the big breakfast, they would have felt fuller throughout the day, and had fewer carbohydrate cravings than the low carbohydrate diet group. 

People who eat breakfast also have a lower BMI on average compared to those who skip breakfast.

The study suggested a breakfast made up of fruit, wholegrain cereal and some lean meat like ham, or eggs for protein. So is a big breakfast something that you can fit in each day? 

See http://www.theage.com.au/news/diet/breakfast-of-slimming-champions/2008/07/17/1216163063578.html for the full article.