I Stopped Eating Breakfast — Without Noticing

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Three and a half kilos in three and a half weeks. That's the number I'm sitting on right now, and it makes me happy.

The funny part: I can't really explain it.

Because when I sat down to work out what I'm actually doing differently, it only slowly dawned on me that I'd simply stopped eating breakfast. Not out of conviction. Not as a plan. It just crept in.

It Wasn't a Decision

I've been getting up later for a while now, because I can. In the morning I drink coffee, and I'm just not hungry with it. So I don't eat anything.

Somewhere around the third day it struck me — not because I felt unwell, but because I suddenly noticed: right, I don't actually eat breakfast anymore. And because it felt good, I just left it that way.

No deprivation, no struggle, no app counting things off for me. Honestly, I didn't even register it as a "method" until I started thinking about it.

What My Day Looks Like Now

The first meal almost always comes at noon. Then a snack around three, dinner at five, a late meal around eight — and at nine the sweet treat of the day. So much for the strict fasting regimen.

The key thing: I don't eat less often. I still eat several times a day, dessert included. I just eat it all in the second half of the day — roughly between noon and nine in the evening.

That works out to about nine hours of eating and fifteen hours off. And that, as I've since learned, has a name.

So What's It Actually Called?

The umbrella term is intermittent fasting. The version I'm doing by accident is technically called time-restricted eating — you put all your meals into a fixed window and fast the rest of the time.

My eating window lands roughly in the range of the most popular variant, 16:8 — sixteen hours off, eight hours of eating. I'm not that precise about it; for me it's more like fifteen hours off and a nine-hour window, sweet treat included. The only reason I even slip into this range is the skipped breakfast — which also has a name, plainly enough: breakfast skipping.

And yes, for the real sticklers: a splash of milk in the morning coffee technically breaks the fast already, and the sweet at nine is no fasting sacrament either. I couldn't care less. I'm not counting seconds and I'm not counting calories, I just don't eat breakfast.

Because my window sits late — noon to evening instead of early morning — it's called a "late window." That'll matter in a minute.

The Myth of the Most Important Meal of the Day

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." We've all got that line in our heads. I looked it up, and it's surprisingly thin.

The phrasing can be traced back to 1917, in a magazine connected to John Harvey Kellogg — yes, the Cornflakes Kellogg. It became a mass slogan in the 1940s thanks to an advertising campaign by General Foods. It was marketing, not a research finding.

And the research itself? A review of thirteen controlled trials in the BMJ (2019) found no weight-loss advantage from breakfast. The breakfast groups actually ended up slightly heavier on average — around half a kilo — and ate roughly 260 more calories over the day. That said, the studies were short and the evidence wasn't particularly strong.

That doesn't mean breakfast is bad. It just means: the sacred status isn't earned.

Would Morning Have Beaten Noon?

This is where it gets, honestly, a little uncomfortable for my late window. Our bodies handle sugar better in the morning than in the evening — insulin sensitivity is highest early in the day. That's well established.

So in head-to-head comparison studies, an early eating window often comes out a touch better than a late one — a bit more fat loss, slightly better sugar readings. So if you have the choice, you eat the bulk of it earlier rather than later.

But "a touch better" isn't "only this works." A late window is no disaster — probably just a little less favorable, mainly for the sugar readings. How much that matters in any individual case depends on your own numbers, your medications, and on what you can actually stick to. And that last point is the most important one anyway: a rhythm you actually keep up beats the perfect plan that collapses after two weeks. Mine keeps itself up on its own.

So Why Am I Really Losing Weight?

Honest answer: I don't know. And I don't even want to overthink it.

The science has a sober guess about this. In studies where people on an eating window got exactly the same number of calories as those without one, the effect on the scale vanished — same calories, same result. One large study over twelve months found no added benefit of an eight-hour window over simply eating less. So the eating window probably isn't some magic metabolism trick, but more of a side effect of removing one opportunity to eat.

So much for the theory. As for me? I honestly can't say whether it's the breakfast, something else entirely, or some mix of the two. I measured nothing, tried nothing, planned nothing. So I'm not telling you "skip breakfast" — I don't even know if that's the reason. It's an observation, nothing more.

One Thing I Don't Want to Leave Out

I have diabetes, and in my case I haven't noticed any difference in my sugar readings. Good for me — but this is exactly where I have to get serious for a moment.

Fasting isn't automatically harmless for people with diabetes. Anyone who injects insulin or takes certain pills — the sulfonylureas, meaning drugs like glibenclamide or gliclazide — runs a real risk of low blood sugar when skipping meals. In a study of people with type 2 diabetes on such medications, low blood sugar was about twice as common on fasting days. You can't map that one-to-one onto every skipped breakfast — but the direction is clear.

Other medications like metformin on its own are barely a problem in this respect. But not everyone knows the difference, and that's exactly why the professional bodies say it plainly: if you have diabetes and want to fast, plan it with your doctor, not on your own.

So what I'm telling you here is an observation about myself — not a set of instructions for you.

And My Dietitian?

I haven't actually filled her in yet, by the way. Not out of a guilty conscience — it simply slipped my mind.

I have no guilt about it. It just came back to me while thinking it all through, and now I'll have to tell her next time.

Or she'll just read it here. In which case: hi. Sorry. I'll explain next time.

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