You Can Burn Twice as Many Calories By Eating More at This Time of Day
We’ve all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but a new study claims to have found another compelling reason to chow down every morning. Could eating a big breakfast help you burn twice as many calories for the rest of the day?
“Eating a big breakfast rather than a large dinner may prevent obesity and high blood sugar,” a press release from the Endocrine Society, a global community of physicians and scientists, claims. The bold claim was published in their Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism and might just change the way you plan your meals each day.
Researchers observed participants who either ate larger breakfasts or dinners to determine which time produced better diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT) — which, in less science-speak, just means how well our metabolism is able to work at burning those calories.
“Our results show that a meal eaten for breakfast, regardless of the amount of calories it contains, creates twice as high diet-induced thermogenesis as the same meal consumed for dinner,” study author Juliane Richter, MSc, PhD, of the University of Lübeck in Germany said. “This finding is significant for all people as it underlines the value of eating enough breakfast.”
You can say that again! In fact, we will: You can burn twice as many calories in a day by eating a bigger breakfast. Most of us might have assumed that to be the case based on the higher level of activity we usually have during the day versus night, but this research highlights how important morning meals are for simply unlocking our body’s ability to boost its own metabolism.
“We recommend that patients with obesity as well as healthy people eat a large breakfast rather than a large dinner to reduce body weight and prevent metabolic disease,” Dr. Richter summarized. Although this was an admittedly small study and more research will be needed to back it up, it’s still exciting to learn more about how our bodies work. Plus, this information can be especially helpful for anyone deciding on a schedule for intermittent fasting. For the rest of us, it’s not about skipping dinner entirely, but just making sure it’s on the smaller side.
Whether you decide to start your day with a savory plate of eggs or something on the sweeter side, your body will be kicked into calorie-burning mode all day long.
