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Eat Breakfast to Lose Weight

Why it's the most important meal of the day

-- By Elizabeth Evans Fryer, Health & Fitness Writer

The first – and easiest – step you should take towards becoming more healthy is so, so simple; it’s eating breakfast. Breakfast eaters get myriad benefits including:

  • a revved up metabolism started early so that it burns the maximum number of calories to fuel your activities
  • fewer total calories consumed throughout the day
  • an increased leptin output
What’s leptin, you ask? Leptin is a hormone that suppresses appetite. Eating a significant meal early in the day ensures our body’s leptin production, says Meg Jordan, Ph.D., R.N. – as reported to First, September 2003. The book "Fit Not Fat at 40-Plus: The Shape-Up Plan That Balances Your Hormones, Boosts Your Metabolism, and Fights Female Fat in Your Forties-And Beyond", published by Prevention Health Books for Women, has more of Dr. Jordan’s thoughts on leptin’s influence on appetite.

Since leptin suppresses appetite, it follows that those of us who eat breakfast would take in fewer calories throughout the day. In fact, researchers at the University of Texas, El Paso, studied the food diaries of 586 men and women and determined that the more food people ate in the morning, the fewer calories they consumed in an entire day. So eat up early – though what we eat for breakfast may affect what we eat later on.
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