I think it is more of a drink coffee lose weight argument.
Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#42I researched Yokozunas and here's my findings. They skip breakfast every single day and exercise for at least 5 hours before breakfast. After lunch, they sleep. With plenty food and no physical activity, the body converts the food to fat. Same thing happens after dinner - sleep. Before electricity, people ate dinner before sun down. This left enough time for some digestion and burning of excess energy. My conclusion:…
A more reasonable conclusion on sumo wrestler lifestyles is to to not eat more than 10000 calories a day like they do! Total caloric intake is so much more important than meal timing.
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the study? Or did you just read the report about the study?
I'm not criticizing the study, but rather lamenting the constantly-shifting landscape that is the field of nutrition. Every few weeks or months, a new study comes out claiming that everything we knew about nutrition before was wrong. It is profoundly discouraging for a lot of people.
This usually has little to do with the field of nutrition or the studies themselves. It has to do with how the media reports the findings of the studies, usually without properly understanding them and without putting them into context. Everything has to be revolutionary, has to prove everything else wrong, even though it's extremely difficult to perform a valid scientific study that proves anything wrong.
My wife has a long-time friend who became a nutritionist, and she'll tell anyone that will listen that most people have a pretty good idea of how to eat right if they don't over-think it, but it becomes very difficult to put it into practice, because everything we do to make food convenient tends to also make it bad for us. Another issue is that medical doctors don't take nutritionists seriously (despite medicine also being a constantly-shifting landscape), and rarely pay attention to diet for anything other than controlling your weight, blood sugar, and cholesterol. This is why we end up with things like "Irritable Bowel Syndrome", which, for most people is likely an undiagnosed food intolerance (and given the most common ingredients in processed foods, it's probably soy or lactose).
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the study? Or did you just read the report about the study?
I'm not criticizing the study, but rather lamenting the constantly-shifting landscape that is the field of nutrition. Every few weeks or months, a new study comes out claiming that everything we knew about nutrition before was wrong. It is profoundly discouraging for a lot of people.
How do you know the studies say those things if you don't read the studies?
Is nutrition bunk, or is reporting on nutrition just very bad?
There's a bunch of things that make nutrition science weird:
1) everyone feels free to talk about it as if they know what they're talking about. You see this on HN. You see this on any forum. But you also have frauds like "Dr" Gillian McKieth (once popular TV / book nutritionist) who put out vast quantities of bullshit information.
2) huge multinational companies engage in well-funded dis-information campaigns to discredit scientists. They do this to avoid increased prices through taxation.
3) science reporting is almost entirely terrible. Those studies don't usually make these grandiose claims. Idiot news paper reporters make the grand claims.
4) researchers can't run real experiments. Most of the science comes from self-reported uncontrolled case studies. Of course it's not going to be as good as a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#45I _never_ eat breakfast and I'm fat.
Interesting. How long between last and first meal? (Apart from the individual case not being representative.)
usually eat at noon or after, then dinner. I don't snack, never eat sugar. I think it's because of the portions I eat :| alcohol might be for something as well.
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#46Losing weight comes down to a pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is a calorie deficit. It's simple science and fact that eating less calories than your maintenance calories (basal metabolic rate) will cause you to lose weight. Once you tackle that, you can move up the pyramid and fine tune to maximize the weight loss by incorporating tactics such as meal timing, quality of ingredients, types of food eaten, or differe…
I guess it's trivial what you say about calorie deficit but the trick is how to not devour that tasty something that you know is there in your fridge when your plan to eat less for a few seconds is only your second priority. Humans get hungry after 4h of not eating with exception of when we sleep. So less sleep results in more craving for food but eating a ton, minutes after waking up results in hunger 4h later. I wa…
> I guess it's trivial what you say about calorie deficit but the trick is how to not devour that tasty something that you know is there in your fridge when your plan to eat less for a few seconds is only your second priority.
I might be a bit extreme but I have no food in my fridge. I have flavored water (0 calories) and I drink that when I'm hungry. At noon I eat out. If I have food at home I eat too much so this is the only way that works for me :|
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#47But no-one really cares about weight - they care about body composition. That is key to understanding all of this, and it's missing from these results. Who cares if you lose weight if it's muscle wasting away? Who cares if your weight stays the same but you're losing fat and gaining heavier muscle?
But certainly they collected body composition data in the course of the study, it just doesn't make the headlines?
Here's the study, despite the fact that the article didn't bother to cite it:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26101624
Seems to me that this study is almost entirely useless for forming the basis of any kind of diet or lifestyle advice because:
It was done over 4 weeks. Almost all controlled diet studies are conducted over short periods of time and are therefore useless as the basis of any long term lifestyle advice (if you want to make any difference to your long-term weight you need to make changes that span years, if not the rest of your life). This is almost inherent in diet studies, because most participants won't accept these kinds of things (skipping breakfast) or even eating a particular diet for long enough periods of time. Imagine as a participant being asked to skip breakfast for 2 years in order to give a decent study length. They're either going to refuse to participate, or have a significant chance of failing to comply with the requirements. This is the reason that so many long-term diet studies are observational (i.e. uncontrolled, just looking at what people do naturally). And observational studies can't be used to determine causality (did people who skipped breakfast lose weight, or were lighter people more likely to skip breakfast, for example).
The study is tiny. n=36 is right on the cusp of being so small as to not have any kind of statistical significance. Further, statistical significance is not the same as a significant effect. The effect size in this study is small. The n is small. So how can you use this as the basis for refuting an existing body of evidence? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This study does not qualify to invalidate the existing scientific consensus.
They did indeed collect body composition data. Have a look at the following table:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4473164/table/ta...
Now it might just be me, but it looks like what the no-breakfast group lost was fat-free mass. But then I would have thought the mean for fat-free mass and fat mass should add up to the overall mean for body weight, which it doesn't. So either I'm missing something or there's an error in the table.
Finally, check out "researcher degrees of freedom":
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/publishing-fals...
Overall, a tiny, weak study, with a single slightly statistically significant result being blown out of all proportion. Such is the state of science reporting these days.
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#48The advice that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" is, as I recall, based on similar junk science. They looked at lots of kids, recorded how often they ate breakfast, then looked at how well they did in school. The kids who ate breakfast did better in school. Yay, breakfast is good for you. Or, possibly, the correlation between eating breakfast and doing well in school has another explanation. One poss…
During my sojourn with Her Majesty's Forces we were never permitted to skip breakfast. Never, regardless of the conditions or schedule.
Other meals could drift through the day but breakfast was fixed and immovable.
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#49Studies have shown that overweight people don't necessarily eat more calories or have less active lifestyles than their normal weight peers [1][2][3][4].
A major factor that contributes to excess weight is the absorption rate of dietary lipids in the gut, which can be influenced by anatomy, gut microbiota, genetics, and other characteristics [5][6][7][8][9]. The rate at which the body absorbs fat from food during digestion plays a key role.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24527563
[2] http://www.livescience.com/23057-overweight-teens-kids-calor...
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22006481
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23320866
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3601187/
[6] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/the-food-figh...
[7] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...
Re: Skipping breakfast might help you lose weight
#50Studies have shown that overweight people don't necessarily eat more calories or have less active lifestyles than their normal weight peers [1][2][3][4]. A major factor that contributes to excess weight is the absorption rate of dietary lipids in the gut, which can be influenced by anatomy, gut microbiota, genetics, and other characteristics [5][6][7][8][9]. The rate at which the body absorbs fat from food during dig…
Studies have shown that overweight people don't necessarily eat more calories or have less active lifestyles than their normal weight peers [1][2][3][4].
These appear to be observational studies based on self reporting. There are multiple studies that showed overweight people underreporting their caloric intake by up to 50%. Interestingly, people with normal and less than normal weight ofter overestimate their caloric intake, such as [1].
There are enough clinically controlled studies done that prove that caloric intake is the primary determinant of weight.