Reader Comments

Major Keto - Can I skip breakfast to lose belly fat?

by laura nicholas (2021-10-04)


When you do not eat breakfast or have a very bad diet during the first hours of the day, your brain can react differently than you are used to, and curiously you may feel a greater attraction towards sugary foods or more precisely, towards junk food.

Scientists from Imperial College London (United Kingdom), led by researcher Tony Goldstone, have shown that, if we skip breakfast, hours later our brain tends to have “cravings” for fatty and high-calorie foods.

How the brain reacts when you don't eat breakfast

This is confirmed in an investigation presented at the Neuroscience 2012 congress, which is being held these days in the United States, made from images of the brain of 21 men and women of normal weight and 25 years of age.

For two consecutive days, they were shown photographs of high-calorie foods while being placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They were asked to rate their appetite for a number of foods, including chocolate, pizza, vegetables, and fish. On the first day, the volunteers were asked not to eat breakfast before the scan, but the next day, an hour before the scan, they were given a 750-calorie breakfast based on cereals, bread and jam.

Evidence of the junk food choice

When urged to "eat as much as they want" at lunch, those who had skipped breakfast showed a clear predisposition toward high-calorie foods. Individuals who had skipped breakfast ate 20 percent more calories.

The scans showed that the region of the brain that might be involved in the attraction to food, the orbitofrontal cortex, became more active when the stomach was empty and especially when you don't eat breakfast. In short, stopping eating first thing in the morning returns to fatty foods and sweets more "attractive" for our brain and favors an unbalanced diet, in addition to enhancing voracity and excessive increase in appetite, bringing other consequences such as overweight and obesity.

Healthy breakfast options

There are many healthy options to get a healthy breakfast that in addition to avoiding the aforementioned problems, can be an ideal complement to diets, to prepare our body to be full of energy or simply to obtain all the necessary nutrients to improve the quality of our diet.

You can try breakfasts to lose weight that will fill you with vitality. Also, another good option are fruits, smoothies and natural juices that can make your breakfast a source of fuel to start the day full of vitality.

After having a very low-carb diet for several months the body gets accustomed to burning fat instead of carbs for energy. This process is known as ketosis, which eventually helps to shed some kilos. But when people again start taking a moderate amount of carb, they witness fluctuation in their weighing scale. To avoid such circumstances, it is crucial to go off keto in a proper way. Here are four things that you must be cautious about when giving up the keto diet to prevent weight gain.

Major Keto