I use to not be able to function without eating shortly after waking up. Now that I'm 'fat adapted' I can go a long time without eating my first meal. Also I workout fasted as well.

My typical day includes eating about 2 servings of fruit on an empty stomach in the late morning. Followed by a medium-larger meal an hour or so later (for example a homemade omelette loaded with green peppers, mushrooms, lean chicken, red onions with hash browns etc.)

About 3 hours after that I'm having my final meal and I'm done for the day outside of drinking water or tea. This routine works really well for me and I'm never hungry.

So while I love breakfast foods I don't have to eat it first thing in the morning, but I may certainly have breakfast for dinner. :)

I am curious to know if those of you who said you wake up hungry have a tendancy to eat at night. The reason I ask is, back when I was thin and healthy, before diabetes, if I ate at night I woke up hungry, if I went to bed hungry, I was no longer hungry when I woke up. Back then I ate breakfast and lunch and usually just a salad for dinner, then nothing until the next morning. I fell asleep the minute my head hit the pillow and didn't wake up until the alarm clock went off. If I ate too close to bedtime I would toss and turn all night. Now that my lifestyle has changed and therefore my eating habits, I wake up every couple hours during the night. I feel that your body should be repairing itself while you sleep, not digesting yur last meal. Or that might just be some bogus information I picked up along the way.

Some people find that once they have the first meal of the day their appetite goes into overdrive and they can't stop eating. It would be benificial for those people to put off eating their first meal of the day. I do that as well as I can and many times I find that if I ignore hunger, the feeling eventually goes away. Other times, since I am type 2 diabetic, I get very shaky and jittery and have to eat something immediately. Normally that would be a sign of a dangerous dip in blood glucose, but I get this way before my glucose reading gets that low.

I cannot attest as to which is most beneficial to my weight loss, breakfast or no breakfast. I tend to eat too much and exercise too little as a result I keep losing and gaining the same 5 lbs over and over again. So I would say for me it's total calories....not when I eat them.

Carol Sue, that has been my experience. When I finish eating earlier at night, especially since I am already quite low carb, I go deeply ketotic and one of the side effects is a diminishing of appetite or even nausea upon trying to eat again. I never had that before, I'd eat late and eat early and be quite hungry for each unless I wasn't restricting calories at all.

If I go to bed hungry, I wake up chew-my-own-arm-off hungry not to mention that I'll toss and turn all night and will not sleep well. If I go to bed just in a normal state from eating my last meal plus a snack a couple of hours later, I wake up with normal hunger. If I wake up and I'm not hungry, that means I'm sick.

^This. Exactly totally this.

If I'm hungry in the morning I eat something. If I'm not, I don't, unless it's a social occasion. There's no reason to force yourself to eat something first thing in the morning if you're not hungry.

Also, there's no evidence that going without food for a while is bad for you. There's some research that actually suggests this is beneficial.For example, people fasting for Ramadan tend to have better health stats by the time it's over. 12, 14, 16 hours without eating? Healthy people do it all the time. It's really your choice, whatever works.

I eat IF I'm hungry. Some days I'll wake up, drink my usual bottle of water and not feel like I need anything else. Most days, I'll wake up, drink water and have an apple or granola bar as their easy to grab on my way to work. Luckily with my line of work, I'm active and don't really get the "cravings" to eat as I'm always doing something. (I'm a massage therapist). I could see if I had a desk job or similar that it would be harder. But I find myself less bloated, less irritable and just.. better (lack of better words), when I "start" my eating day at lunch time. Weekends, I sleep in a bit and technically my breakfast happens at lunch time, but I haven't found that eating or not eating breakfast has caused me to crave or binge later in the day.

I feel like crap if I don't eat within the 30 minutes of waking up. I just slap something together that is substantial, otherwise I will want to go right back to sleep!