Morning Snacks Sabotage Weight Loss

Mom was right when she said “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

A new weight loss study published in the Journal of the American Diabetic Association is demonstrating that eating a filling and nutritious breakfast can have a huge impact on women’s weight loss.

Women taking part in a weight loss study who ate a “midmorning snack,” after breakfast, lost an average of 7 percent of their body weight over a year, compared to an 11 percent loss of body weight among women who did not eat a morning snack.

Researchers are arguing that the urge to grab a snack during the relatively short time between breakfast and lunch could be a sign of generally less healthy eating, and may sabotage your diet more than snacking at other times of the day. Women who snacked in the morning, between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m., were also more likely to snack throughout the day.

In general, snacking can be a crucial element in weight loss and successful dieting. Healthy snacks can help dieters stay full and get more healthy foods. The key is deciding when snacking is a response to hunger and when it is a force of habit or boredom.

Dieters on weight-loss programs should be “educated on ways to healthfully incorporate snacks into the diet,” the researchers wrote in the conclusion of the study. They should also choose high protein breakfasts that will fuel and fill their bodies through to lunch!

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Source: MSNBC “Morning Snacking May Be Damaging Your Diet”