Does skipping breakfast really affect my metabolism?

   It must go against logic to claim that eating a nutritious meal right when you wake up may help you to lose or maintain weight and increase your metabolism.  Most people believe that by consistently skipping breakfast they’re reducing their total daily calories, and helping to make their diet more successful…but this is unfortunately not true for even one of the men and women who begin every morning without ANY dietary energy.  Our body’s physiology governs metabolic rate and research shows that when we sleep or have a very low activity level, our metabolism-the rate that your body burns calories/energy performing bodily function, slows down and only returns to the normal daily rate after a meal has been eaten,

Reference:  http://www.mynmi.net/student/ccer/podcasts/breakfast.html

   If breakfast is ignored, the body will conserve as much energy as is possible to ensure that there will be enough energy for later in the day.  So, if you skip out on the first meal of the day, your body is burning fewer calories that it would have if you’d had breakfast and performed the same activities.  To explain this phenomena, you must view skipping breakfast as a type of prolonged fasting.  During any type of prolonged fasting the body very quickly responds by beginning to transition into “starvation mode”, which enables the body to conserve as many calories as possible.  The body’s insulin response increases, which increases fat storage leads to weight gain.  This suggests that skipping breakfast actually increases a person’s risk for obesity!

Breakfast not only jumpstarts and helps to maintain a healthy active metabolism, but it also helps to reduce the temptation of snacking and/or overeating later that day, and it gives you the energy to be more physically active, which further increases metabolic rate and calorie burning throughout the day!