I don't eat breakfast. For some reason I'm hungry and wanting to eat all day long if I eat before 1-3 in the afternoon. Normally, I just eat between 3-8. I guess I'm doing IF and didn't even realize it lol.
I always called it "opening up my stomach" and for some reason if I don't eat, i'm fine but as soon as I eat anything, I just want to continue eating all day.....I also delay eating in the morning, mostly because it just doesn't fit good into my busy mornings...and I don't mind skipping breakfast because I eat enough later in the day anyhow
Location: from Houston, TX—now in Maryland (Washington DC area)
Posts: 1,167
S/C/G: 351/267/140
Height: 5'3"
I'm not exactly skipping breakfast, but all I have is coffee with cream. I got started on putting cream in my coffee because it's allowed on the Atkins diet—no carbo grams in cream. Within a few days I realized that those 2 tablespoons of cream were enough to keep me powered and going 'til noon. So other than that cream, I'm only eating between 12 and 6:30 or so—just lunch and dinner and no snacks. I'm still tweaking the proportions to see what works best for my weight loss.
I can skip dinner, no problem. But breakfast - no way! I adore breakfast. With a decent breakfast, and maybe greek yogurt with berries around 2pm, I can easily get to the next day.
I literally can't think deeply without breakfast. I could do typical desk work hungry, talking to customers, etc... But, if I am doing complex software programming or mathematical modeling, my tummy must start the day full :-) Funny how that is for me.
I couldn't do this. I wake up in the morning starving. I never eat at night and rarely after 7-8pm. I just have a half a cup of granola and with half cup skim milk and I'm good till 12, but I couldn't do nothing for breakfast during the week.
On the weekends, I have two meals a day: brunch and dinner. We all wake up around 9-10 and don't eat breakfast until 11-12.
I'm still losing weight eating breakfast, so definitely see no reason to quit.
I never eat before 2 PM. I have coffee with a tiny splash of soy milk and lots of tea with Torani sf vanilla syrup. I usually have a tall glass of crystal light with my psyllium husks and use that to down my morning vitamins. But as for eating I try to wait until 2 or 3 PM because if I eat sooner, I lose my will power and I end up using up all my carbs/calories by 6 PM, and then I cheat at night when the family is asleep.
I find that if I skip breakfast, I can maintain better control all day long and then I don't cheat at night.
Yes I'm skipping breakfast more and more often lately, in an IF sort of way. If I only restrict myself to eat between 11am (I'm up since 6am) until 6pm then I feel better on most days.
Most importantly I have learned that the age-old advice about eating frequent small meals was something that DID NOT WORK FOR ME. It was a shocking revelation, but eating small snacks just made me hungrier and thinking about food all the time. Where as now I'm perfectly content to go from lunch to dinner without a single snack. It's like a mental thing, I turn off the eating machine and don't think about it until dinner whereas before I was constantly scrounging for little calorie appropriate snacks that ultimately left me unsatisfied. It was super annoying and I didn't even know it. Same thing has happened with breakfast, I don't miss it much when I don't eat it and it allows me to eat a nice hearty lunch.
I always called it "opening up my stomach" and for some reason if I don't eat, i'm fine but as soon as I eat anything
OH YES! I agree. There will be minutes of HUNGRY but it's gone in a minute. It helps show me that I won't die if I don't eat right now.
Quote:
It was a shocking revelation, but eating small snacks just made me hungrier and thinking about food all the time.
Oh yeah. I would wake up and ask my ex, "what's for dinner? What's for whatever?" I'd freak out if I didn't have enough food or something. I still obsess about not having the right amount of food. But I don't die if I don't eat. I may have some coffee when I wake up though. But I try to keep it under 50 cals. IF eating has given me freedom from obsessing over food.
Although when I am ready for eating, I don't want anyone to stop me I had a waffle house date a few months ago and I was like, "I don't care. I want to go now. I haven't ate in 18 hours. so let's do this!"
There's evidence when people who normally eat breakfast are instructed to skip it, they eat more calories at lunch... but not enough calories to make up for having skipped breakfast. So, skipping breakfast can work in one's favor that way.
Breakfast-skipping has traditionally been associated with overweight and obesity, but not in a causal manner. Often, it's the people who pig out at night that skip breakfast because they're not hungry. If they later start eating breakfast regularly, it's usually done in the context of trying to get healthy and/or lose weight. And people who stick to their new ways of eating (as well know very well) tend to keep the weight off. For them, eating breakfast sets the occasion for "good" eating habits, and skipping breakfast sets the occasion for reverting back to "bad" eating habits. So, skipping breakfast can work against someone too.
There's nothing magical about eating or skipping breakfast. It all depends on what that leads you to do the rest of the day.
You may be losing weight but with what you are eating you are losing muscle right along with fat and lowering your metabolism. Eating junk is not good for anyone at any weight.
I think there are breakfast people and non-breakfast people (and maybe some who can swing either way). Some people have told me that the thought of food in the morning makes them a little queasy. My own teens also have to be coaxed to eat breakfast (and sometimes I don't bother). My mother was the exact opposite: if she skipped breakfast, she was nauseated by 11 a.m. and violently ill by 2 p.m. I'm not quite as extreme, but breakfast is the meal I find most satisfying on all levels. If I were to skip any meal it would be supper.
I had a waffle house date a few months ago and I was like, "I don't care. I want to go now. I haven't ate in 18 hours. so let's do this!"
