Researchers from the Hospital de Clinicas in Caracas, Venezuela say eating a big breakfast packed with protein and carbohydrates helps cut cravings for sweet or starchy foods, as well as boosting the metabolism. Breakfast has long been touted as the most important meal of the day, particularly for those who want to lose weight.
Scientists also added that this type of diet helps lose weight in the long term as opposed to the crash diet, which is effective in losing weight fast but when stopped, results in immediate weight gain and the number of pounds lost also become stagnant after some time.
Researchers looked at how breakfasting habits affected the weight of almost 100 obese young women by putting them on a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet. Half of the subjects had a big breakfast, taking in almost 1,240 calories in a single high-protein, high-carbohydrate meal for nearly eight months.
After nearly four months, the women eating small breakfasts had lost an average of around 5 ponds more than the women who ate high calorie breakfast. However, the weight loss did not last longer for low calorie dieters as after eight months, the small breakfasters had regained an average of 18 pounds of weight.
Comparatively, the women who ate healthy high calorie big breakfasters continued to lose weight, shedding another 16.5 ponds on average, the Daily Mail reports. The researchers concluded that at the end of the study, the big breakfast eaters had lost more than 21 per cent of their body weight compared with just 4.5 per cent for the other women.
The big-breakfast diet also helps in losing weight in a healthy way than an extremely low-carbohydrate diet because it allows people to eat more fruit and therefore get enough fiber and vitamins, the researchers noted.
Results were presented Tuesday, June 17, at The Endocrine Society's 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
