Best meal to skip -- breakfast, lunch or dinner?

(Joan Hulvey) #1

“When healthy adults eat meals that are identical in terms of both their macronutrient and caloric content at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, the postprandial glucose increase is lowest after breakfast and highest after dinner even though the meals were 100% identical. This is just one example that suggests metabolism changes throughout the day. We also know that in humans metabolic genes are more active during the day and less active at night. The underlying reason for this is because humans are diurnal creatures which means we conduct most of our activities during the day, including feeding, exercising, and working, and then resting at night.”
source: http://tim.blog/2017/05/25/transcript-dr-rhonda-patrick-on-exploring-smart-drugs-fasting-and-fat-loss/?utm_content=buffer620c9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

It’s always much easier/natural for me to skip dinner than breakfast, yet with all of the bulletproof coffee/IF craze, I thought I should change that. Embracing the fatty breakfast! Experiences anyone?

(Allan Misner) #3

I find it much easier to skip breakfast for a few reasons:

  1. My wife typically isn’t up before I leave for work, but she is with me during dinner time.
  2. I like working out fasted and the morning is the best time for me to get to the gym.
  3. Cortisol peaks in the morning and although I wouldn’t be eating carbs, eating during a high cortisol time typically kills fat burning and fat gain will be abdominal.
#4

Even if skipping dinner is technically better from a strictly physiological standpoint (and we would need more human IF trials to know for sure), my personal opinion is that the way society is structured means skipping breakfast is the more sustainable option over the long haul. There are way more social and work events that involve food and drink in the later hours of the day. Also dinner usually involves more real food for most people than breakfast does, so no-breakfast IF would be an easier single-habit lifestyle change for a greater number of people.

(Joan Hulvey) #5

Thanks for highlighting that paragraph. That encourages me even more to give this a shot.
This schedule reminds me of the traditional one followed in Italy, at least back in the early 70s when I was a student in Fiuggi, a smaller town in the mountains south of Rome. They would have a meager breakfast early, then go to work/school/shops. At what we would call lunch time all of the shops would close down and the workers would eat a main meal with their families at home, then rest for at least an hour. Shops would re-open in the late afternoon/early evening. When arriving back home for the night, they might have a snack or would often walk in the piazzas where coffee, gelato, pastries and alcohol were served in open cafes.

Today I had 2 meals so far – at 8:30 am and 12:30 pm. I’m going to do it for a week and will report the results.