Big Breakfast Diet: A Diet That Works?

It's a well known fact that eating a good breakfast helps with weight loss and protein takes a long time to break down in your body so makes perfect sense to me, thing is there are that many studies saying this and that who has time to keep swapping and changing.

If something works for you keep at it as the saying goes KISS keep it simple stupid.

It's a relatively small study so I would like to see if the findings would be the same in a bigger trial. But I think it's definitely about the protein here. And I know personally, breakfast with protein, fiber, and some good fats help me stay full well into the day.

Those numbers don't add up! If you add up the grams of carbs per day for the big breakfast group you get 97, not 58 (58 + 34 + 5). I think this is relevant when comparing the diets.

Even though the sample size is small the results are vastly different between the two groups and would suggest statistical significance. I think it makes great sense and am not really surprised by the findings.

i dont eat breakfast every day but on the days i do, i always choose a lot of carbs because i know that if i eat breakfast, i'll never be hungry for lunch. needing the energy from the carbs to last me all day, this makes perfect sense if you indulge in a high carb breakfast and restrict them during snacks and other meals, you feel a little bit less lethargic starting up- and your appetite is not as fierce throughout the day.

This one is truly a mess...so many confounding variables to deal with, it really can't be said one way or the other what happened!

We've got more calories, more protein, different macronutrient ratios, more and less carbohydrate and fat, no clue about actual foods consumed, no clue about micronutrient intakes, no idea what either was told to do during the maintenance phase that led one group to gain and the other to continue losing...oy!

That said, both diets were low-calorie and low-carb too....97g in the big breakfast group is still low-carb.

The other issue is that this was a poster presentation, led by a researcher specifically promoting her particular diet book that this study was based upon....no peer review of the data or conclusions.....so until it's replicated, I don't hold the results all that highly.

We take the kids out for a big breakfast about once a month. Breakfast includes eggs, toast, hashbrowns, and some type of breakfast meat. I know that I feel stuffed for the rest of the day and don't want to eat another thing.

Maybe the saying "eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper" might have some merit.

This is an interesting study. I've always read that the low-carb diet is hard to maintain over the long-term. The idea behind this seems reasonable, but like some other, I'd like to see more studies performed with similar results.

I have always found that this works for me. But I would rather up the protein go easy on the carbs. I find that when the carbs gram count is high I crave carbs a whole day.

Ok, look at the total calorie numbers and the interest in this story goes away. 610 calories is not a "big breakfast" by Western definitions and 1240 calories fits within the modern idea of highly restricted. I've seen this study get enormous amounts of press and excitement, but seriously. There is nothing new here. 1200-1500 has been shown to be more effective than tighter restriction for weight loss. How you skew the calories simply may or may not be relevant.

The big breakfast group ate more calories per day, that could have helped them feel slightly more full, they also ate more grams of protein. For both groups those calories seem extremely low to me.

When are we going to stop promoting super low calories levels that are impossible to maintain long term without turning into a zombie? Never, it was a rhetorical question.

This study didn't compare low carb to big breakfast, it compared low CALORIE to big breakfast. Low carb eaters typically eat big breakfasts, eat more calories, & DON'T eat bread

Seems to me the low carb group was intentionally mis-named in order to discredit low carb diets.

The study is a big mess. What were they trying to compare: high-carb vs. low-carb; big breakfast vs. little breakfast; high protein vs. moderate protein; low calorie vs. severely low calorie; a little of everything?

Why would you ever design the study this way?

Thanks Mike. Fantastic breakdown and summary.

Who did this study; a group of grad students that have no clue how to set up an experiment?? Anyone in the research field knows that in order for a study to have any merit, you need to have only one variable at a time. This study varied total calories, carbohydrate count, fat count, how many calories were consumed at breakfast, etc. Also, how were the rest of the day's calories consumed? Did the small breakfast eaters eat a lot at lunch? Dinner? What about the big breakfast group? Did the very low carb group stick to the diet after the initial 4 months, or did they relax a bit on their regimen? Did the groups exercise?

Anyways, rant over...I usually find that when I eat a high protein breakfast, I stay full longer than if it's just carbs. I like a yogurt with oatmeal and some fruit...the fiber plus the protein and the complex carbs keep me going all morning long. But the truth is, you have to watch your total calorie intake as well...this study restricted calories in both groups, which would probably cause weight loss in just about anyone.

Does anyone notice that the low carb group consumed around 1,000 calories a day?? No wonder there was low compliance in the last 4 months. Geez! That's not even healthy, let alone sustainable.

Not to mention that bread and cereal are not low carb in the slightest...

The "Big-Breakfast Diet" … The Loophole of the Research

Daniela Jakubowicz, MD, of the Hospital de Clinicas, Caracas, Venzezuela with scientists from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, performed a research that concluded that eating a big breakfast packed with carbohydrates and protein, followed by a low-carb, low-calorie diet the rest of the day can lead to significant weight loss amounting to 21.3% of body weight within 8 months as they said.

The "big-breakfast diet group" (48 dieters) ate 1,240 calories a day out of which 610-calorie were eaten in a big breakfast. According to the researchers, these women lost nearly 23 pounds on average after the passage of 4 months and continued to lose weight, shedding another 16.5 pounds after completing 8 months. This means a total loss in body weight of 39.5 pounds representing 21.3% of their body weight,

After analyzing the details of the research and the published results, I concluded that there is a loophole in the research making its results delusive. My conclusion is based on the following facts:

1. The researchers claimed that the weight loss amounted to 21.3%. By performing simple calculation (dividing 39.5 pounds by 21.3%), we can deduct that the starting body weight was around 185.4 pounds (i.e. around 84.3 Kgm).

2. According to Mufflin equation the Resting Metabolic Rate "RMR" for women can be found through the following formula:

(10 x w) + (6.25 x h) – (5 x a) – 161

Where:

w = weight in Kgm
h = height in cm
a = age in years

Since the article showed that the average age of the women was in the 30s, we can assume that it was around 35 years. Regarding the height we can consider the average women height around 165 cm.

Based on these fair and normal assumptions, the RMR of the "big-breakfast diet group" will equal:

(10 x 84.3) + (6.25 x 165) – (5 x 35) – 161 = 1,538 calorie

3. For sedentary life, the total energy expenditure is found through multiplying RMR by a factor of 1.2.

1,538 x 1.2 = 1,845 calorie

4. By entering every week's weight loss in the above mentioned equations for the eight months period, we will find that the total weight loss in the first 4 months is 19.2 pounds and not 23 pounds. This means that the researchers overstated the weight loss by 4 pounds. For the next 4 months the total weight loss was 15.5 pounds and not 16.5 pounds. This means that the authors added a total of 5 pounds extra in their research.

5. It is well apparent that such research does not put into consideration the human factor. No single person on the globe could eat daily a restricted diet of 1,240 calories for successive 240 days (except of course if he/she is in jail).

So if we add just extra 20 percent of the basic calories of researchers for the human factor, this will give us only a loss of 17.5 pounds instead of 39.5 pounds as the declared.

This shows us the big gap between an office theoretical work and a true clinical practical research.

In contrast, there are many scientific factors behind the marked success of my innovated "Elhashemy's Broad Spectrum Luqaimat Diet Plan", where my super obese patients (on average BMI 45+ or around 270 pounds) lose 72 pounds on average after the passage of the first year. This loss is proportional to their original heavy weight. One of the factors behind this success is that they are well trained to eat small meals and well supported by consultation and education for 3 months. Another factor is that it is much more convenient as they don’t need to bother themselves with calorie counting. A third factor is that they get a moderate-sized meal (lunch or dinner) as a reward to the brain centers. This reward boosts their mood and encourages them to continue on this scientific diet plan for long.

I think one could make the argument, for the big breakfast eaters, that they're eating much less fat. Fat is fattening, not just carbs.

I think there have been some great points raised here. Regina/Spectra - thanks for the insightful analysis regarding the methodology. There are more flaws in the study than I had first suspected.

I do think protein accounted for the difference in the maintenance stage of the study.

I agree there are too many variables here: With a big breakfast participants ate 33% of calories as fat and with the low carb they were eating 64% of calories as fat - a huge difference. Plus calorie levels were very low. It might have been better described as a high fat vs. low fat starvation diet.

But more importantly, this study came out of Caracas, Venezuela, a part of the world with a very mild tropical climate and where people fare best on a high carb diet, not a high fat diet. Studies conducted in colder parts of the world generally show a high fat diet promotes both weight loss and health, more so than a low-fat diet. We need more fat when we live in the cold, less in the tropics.

According to Eastern medicine, lunch should be the big meal of the day, as this is when our digestive chi is at its highest and thus we can burn off the calories easiest. This may be why lunch (not breakfast) is the biggest meal of the day throughout the world, except for in the U.S., the world's fattest nation.

I'm no scientist, but I have been trying this diet for 2 weeks, and I did lose 3 pounds, which I had been trying to lose for a very long time with no success. The protein in the morning does stick with me, and I am not grazing for food all day the way I used to. And I can walk past the chocolate bars and cookies at work, which is also new for me. I was always in the habit of eating breakfast, but not this large and not including protein. Just my 1 cent.