Thread: Too much emphasis on breakfast when dieting will cost you muscle mass

Too much emphasis on breakfast when dieting will cost you muscle mass

If you want to lose weight you need to make sure you get a good breakfast. Try asking Google. But a small study done in 1997 showed that athletes may not be taking the best approach to dieting if they put
too much emphasis on breakfast. Doing this means you lose lean body mass – in other words muscle mass.

In the 1970s researchers did experiments in which they gave their subjects just one meal a day. [Chronobiologia 1975; 2(suppl 1): 33.] The meal provided just enough calories to maintain body weight. When the subjects ate their meal in the evening they maintained the same weight. When they ate their meal in the mornings they lost a little weight.

Since that experiment, nearly all real and self-appointed slimming experts will tell you have to eat breakfast if you want to lose weight. The more of your daily calories you consume in the morning, the more of those calories you'll burn, the story goes. The more calories you eat early in the morning, the higher your rate of metabolism and the more calories you burn. Ergo: breakfasting makes you slim.

In bodybuilding manuals you sometimes come across advice to strength athletes to "eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper". This was often accompanied by a photo of a broad-shouldered grinning hulk sitting at a table in front of a couple of pints of milk, a bunch of bananas, four kilograms of cottage cheese, a hunk of raw meat, a plate of brown rice and a couple of dozen boiled eggs. And the caption would be: A strength athlete’s day starts with a good breakfast.

Unfortunately the researchers in the seventies didn't look at body composition. Nutritionists at the American department of agriculture did look at this in their experiments, however. In 1997 they published in the Journal of Nutrition the results of a study in which they had got 10 women to lose weight on a not too strict diet in which the women were given 2 meals a day – breakfast and dinner.

The women were divided into 2 groups. One group followed the AM-pattern for the first 6 weeks of the study. For this the women consumed 70 percent of their daily calorie intake at breakfast. The other half followed the PM-pattern, consuming 70 percent of their daily calories at dinner.

After 6 weeks the women changed over their eating pattern. The women who had started with the AM-pattern then did 6 weeks on the PM-pattern; the women who had started with the PM-pattern did the next 6 weeks on the AM-pattern.

It's good advice for people who only eat one or two meals a day, but doesn't apply to 3, 4, 5 or 6 meal a day types.