Planet Wonder

Sorry for the splashy title, but I’ve got something to share.  Please know I’m not selling anything.  I’ve got no products to talk about, no eBook to buy, nothing but a report of something that seems to be working for me.

For various reasons (age, sedentary life-style, etc.) I’ve put on weight.  With the extra pounds came some of the “riders” that often accompany weight gain.  Not just cosmetic, but health issues have begun to be a problem.

Worse, I’m not so good at strict dieting, and as a writer I spend more time sitting down than walking around.  But the weight needs to come off.

Here’s what I’ve learned quite by accident:

Breakfast.

Yep.  That’s it in a word.  The one-word secret for weight loss (at least for me) is “breakfast”.

I always thought that skipping a meal, especially one that was a bother, would be a fine way to restrict calories.  Bye-bye, breakfast.

The weight would fluctuate, go down a bit, come back a bit, come back a bit more, and so on.  My doctor told me I needed to lose weight.  He told me I was on the verge of being diabetic.

I added glucose-control shakes to my diet, and specifically for breakfast, the meal I had been avoiding.

My idea was to add regular meals, small ones, mind you, with low-cal, low-fat, and so on, foods.  It worked.  I lost 25 pounds in a month.  But then I’d backslide in the process  a bit.  I was still having my morning shake, but other snacks crept in, and my evening meal grew a bit.

Oddly, the weight loss continued.  How can this be, I asked myself?

Breakfast.

It turns out (and some Google searches after the fact helped verify it) that starting the day with a meal did some important things.  Aside from the obvious of reducing hunger for the first part of the day, the morning meal got the metabolism going, started calories burning, and the small meals during the day keeps it up.

Is eating breakfast a sure way to lose weight?  Some studies show that it is.  Of course this doesn’t mean that you can spend the rest of the day eating potato chips or eating candy.  We need to be responsible for what goes into our bodies, but it looks like breakfast is a shoo-in, a magic meal.

Your thoughts?