Why eating ‘breakfast like kings’ may not help you lose weight: study

Eating a big breakfast and a smaller dinner may not be the best way to lose weight, according to new research.

A study of overweight people found that they burned a similar amount of calories regardless of when they ate the heaviest meal of the day.

The old proverb “The king’s breakfast, the prince’s lunch, and the beggar’s meal” suggests a myth.

The idea was that loading calories early in the morning gives our bodies more time to burn them throughout the day.

To test the theory, researchers at the University of Aberdeen put 30 obese or overweight men and women on two separate diets, each lasting one month.

On the first diet, they consumed most of their calories in the morning, and on the second diet, they consumed the largest meal in the evening.

There was no difference in energy burned or weight loss between diets. On both meal plans, participants lost an average of 3 kg (7 lbs).

However, when they ate a big breakfast, they reported feeling less hungry throughout the day, suggesting that a big breakfast could still be a good strategy for weight watchers.

Lead author Professor Alexandra Johnstone, from the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, said: “The advice to eat breakfast like a king is one of the many myths about how to lose weight by burning calories.

“It now seems like a calorie is burned the same way regardless of the time of day.

“But a bigger breakfast makes people less hungry so they can lose weight that way.”

The study, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, included 16 men and 14 women with an average age of 50 and a BMI of 32.5. A BMI between 18 and 25 is considered healthy.

Each person in the study was given two separate diets, each lasting four weeks and containing only food and drink provided by the researchers.

With the “big breakfast” diet, they consumed 45% of their daily calories from the first meal of the day and only 20% from dinner.

While following the big dinner diet, they got 45% of their daily calories from dinner and 20% from breakfast.

On both diets, people burned just over 2,800 calories per day on average.

Therefore, they did not burn more calories after a big breakfast compared to a large dinner on a fixed diet of about 1,700 calories per day.

But in the real world, where people can eat whatever they want after a full breakfast, new evidence shows that eating breakfast like royalty can help you lose weight.

This is because people in the study were significantly less hungry on the big breakfast diet.

They had less appetite for a questionnaire asking how full they felt at the time and how much they could eat.

When breakfast was the most important meal of the day, people also had lower levels of the “hunger hormone” ghrelin and higher levels of a hormone called GLP-1, which is believed to make people feel full.

Previous research has shown that they lose more weight if they eat more in the morning, as they may eat less for lunch and dinner.

The new study gave people a more satisfying breakfast, for example, by increasing their servings of bacon and eggs or adding cereals and smoothies.

According to the carbon dioxide analysis of their breath, it was found that the larger meal kept people full for longer, as it took an average of two hours longer to digest even half of what they ate.

To measure calories burned, the researchers gave study participants “heavy water” to drink and then measured the balance of hydrogen and oxygen in the water in their urine.

This indicates how much carbon dioxide they have lost from their bodies, which is directly related to the number of calories they burn.

Professor Johnstone said: “There is no best time to eat when it comes to calories, but a big breakfast can help you control your appetite and stick to your diet if you’re trying to lose weight.”