A Possible Weight Loss Strategy: Skip Breakfast Before Exercise

Skipping breakfast before exercise might reduce how much we eat during the remainder of the day, according to a small but intriguing new study of fit young men.

Weight management is, of course, one of the great public   and private   health concerns of our time. But the role of exercise in helping people to maintain, lose or, in some instances, add pounds is problematic. Exercise burns calories, but in many past studies, people who begin a new exercise program do not lose as much weight as would be expected, because they often compensate for the energy used during exercise by eating more later or moving less.

These compensations indicate that our brains are receiving internal communiqués detailing how much energy we used during that last workout and, in response, sending biological signals that increase hunger or reduce our urge to move. Our helpful brains do not wish us to sustain an energy deficit and starve.

Skipping or consuming breakfast also can matter. When we eat a meal, our bodies rely on the carbohydrates in those foods as a primary source of energy. Some of those carbohydrates are stored in our bodies, but those internal stores of carbohydrates are small compared to the stores of fat. Some researchers believe that our brains may pay particular attention to any reductions in our carbohydrate levels and rush to replace them.

This is where breakfast comes in. If we skip eating in the morning, we have no calories from a meal available for fuel during exercise and instead will rely on and reduce our internal carbohydrate stores, along with some of our fat.

Some researchers have speculated that we might then wind up overcompensating later, eating more calories than we burned during the workout and undermining our efforts to maintain or lose weight.

Lara Khouli.