Why Skipping Breakfast Is Not the Best Idea

About 60% of teenagers skip breakfast at least 3 times a week. And females skip over three times the rate of males. The most common reason for skipping breakfast is not having enough time. Yet 22% of teenage girls say they skip meals because they are “on a diet.” It is a seemingly normal practice for women and girls who want to loose weight to skip breakfast and sometimes even lunch, believing the all too common myth “eating less leads to less fat.” This is entirely untrue. In fact, eating less not only completely deprives your body of everything it needs to function, but leads to weight gain in the long run.

When surveyed, a good portion of people in this room, myself included, said that you skip a meal (usually breakfast) every so often. Some of you said you don’t eat breakfast at all. This is where modern living and human needs clash. In this “new day and age” and all, everything is busy. Everything is fast. There’s no more time for breakfast, let alone your personal life. But you still need to eat. Your body and your well being demand it.

Say you were to eat dinner at 7 o’clock. You wake up at 6:30 the next morning, skip breakfast, and don’t eat lunch until noon. You’ve just gone 17 hours without eating. Does that sound like a lot? It should. You’ve just starved yourself, intentionally or not, for more than the length of a normal waking day. And what if your lunch is minimal? Or even worse, non existent? You know that stereotypical situation? The one all of us have seen in action? The table of 10 or so 12 to 14 year old girls all sharing a school supplied, plastic-box salad? And remember, these are middle schoolers we’re talking about.

Skipping meals leads to low blood sugar. Your body needs sugar to do everything a body needs to, like moving or thinking. And according to Graham Hiscott, the number of girls ages 14 to 15 skipping lunch has increased nine-fold since 1984. Though this is a British study, the numbers are similar everywhere. More teens are skipping essential meals than ever before.

You use food for everything you do, a no-brainer right? Not only do you function at a lower level, but the human body has a sort of “fail safe.” Sheridan Woodcroft tells us that if you suddenly stop eating when you’re supposed to, your body goes “oh dear, I’m starving, better conserve all my resources” so you burn fat at a much slower rate than normal in an attempt to stay alive longer. And in the case of another “emergency” the next meal you eat will be converted almost entirely into fat to be stored. Not exactly what a person on a diet would want.

And also there’s the basic issue of eating. Once you’ve skipped a meal, you’re going to need to make up for the calories you missed out on. Skipping meals leads to hunger pangs and later on, binge eating. Your body will lower your fullness impulse. That’s the signal that your stomach sends out saying, “stop eating! I’m full!” And when that’s off, you will eat and eat until you stop. And I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one here who’s done that; where you eat and eat and once you stop you feel like you’re about to explode because you didn’t notice how full you were? That’s because when you’re “starving” your body does everything it can to make you eat more. Another thing a person on a diet definitely does not want.

The most common reasons for skipping breakfast given by teenagers are “I have no time”, “I’m not hungry in the morning”or “I’m on a diet”. None of these are good excuses, unless of course you have no food in your home, which did account for 3% of those surveyed. Because, so what if you have no time? Grab a banana. Grab an energy