Here is why skipping any of the three main meals is beneficial.
Which meal is best to skip for health purposes?
Skipping meals has become a popular method of dieting. Experts reveal that, metabolically, this could prove beneficial because it allows you to transition to more fat utilization and liberation of fat, i.e.. you manage your fuel reserves better.
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Skipping Breakfast
Breakfast has become the most common option for people to skip when following some form of time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting because they find it easy. It’s the meal commonly taken at a time of hurry, as you rush out the door in the morning. This is coupled with the fact that, of the three meals of the day, breakfast tends to be the smallest. On average, people consume around 20 per cent of their overall intake at breakfast and the subsequent 80 across the rest of the day, making it a much easier meal to part with.
A lot of the logic for skipping breakfast comes from elongating the fasted state we achieve while sleeping. You’re initiating a longer period between your previous meal the night before and the one you have the next day. For many, this works out as the easiest way to implement regular intermittent fasting and reap the metabolic benefits that go with it.
The other unique upshot to skipping breakfast over other meals is it allows you to capitalise on the benefits of fasted exercise. Particularly popular among cardio athletes, either skipping breakfast or delaying it until after a morning workout has been widely adopted as a way to use the body’s fat stores as fuel.
From a public health perspective, skipping breakfast has had its critics, too. Breakfast, they say, is the most important meal of the day. But the evidence to support this largely comes from epidemiological findings that populations who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight. Indeed, though the correlation exists on paper, it is conceivable that the data overlooks the fact that the people skipping breakfast could be doing so to try and lose weight, rather than it being the cause of being overweight, and that there is a larger nutritional mishap taking place to cause this statistic.
Skipping Lunch
In the space of a typical day, the timings of breakfast, lunch and dinner helps your body to replenish blood sugar levels through the day. Not only do you accumulate energy across the day (by having those three meals), you’re likely to be amplifying it each time. Breakfast is small, lunch bigger and dinner bigger still. So, there’s a fair bit of sense in thinking that rather than just extending the sleep fast by either skipping dinner or skipping breakfast, you introduce a fasted state in the middle of the day.
You have breakfast at say, 7 am, dinner at 7 pm, and this 12 hour period in-between is enough time for the body to resort to its fat stores for energy.
Skipping Dinner
Skipping dinner is behaviorally much harder than breakfast according to experts. Culturally, we have become accustomed to a large energy load in the evening. But in spite of relative difficulty, herein lies one of the biggest cases for choosing it as the meal to miss.
Skipping dinner is the most impactful because the amount of food you’re not eating is much greater than at breakfast yet you still get the benefits of intermittent fasting as you’re still extending the night fast (while your sleep).
Humans are designed to deal with meals earlier in the day better than later in the day, the start of your active period rather than the start of your inactive period.
Conclusion
While skipping each of the three meals has its own strong benefits, skipping supper seems like the most ideal for health purposes because of the circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythms are physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a 24-hour cycle. These natural processes respond primarily to light and dark and affect most living things, including animals, plants, and microbes. Eating at the beginning of your most inactive state of the day (supper/dinner) would rather be avoided.
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