The Big Breakfast Diet!

We've all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but now a study has concluded that you can lose more weight if you have a big breakfast.

Women who were on the big breakfast diet lost almost 5 times the weight than did those who were on a low carb diet.

Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz has this explanation for the process. Upon awakening, your body looks for food. The metabolism is geared up for it and your levels of adrenaline and cortisol are at their peaks. The brain needs energy immediately and if you don't eat or have too little, it has to look for that energy elsewhere. So it goes into a system that takes energy from muscle, which destroys the muscle tissue. When you do eat later in the day the body saves the energy from the food you just ate as fat.

To make it even worse, the levels of serotonin in your brain are at their highest in the morning. So your cravings are at their lowest. Later, when the serotonin levels start dropping you get cravings for cake and chocolate and things like that. When you give in and eat those treats the level of serotonin rise. This is not good because your body associates the treats with feeling good and that becomes addictive.

In the Big Breakfast Diet, the breakfast actually is about half your daily calories. It's composed of milk, 1 oz. candy or chocolate, 2 servings of whole grains, 1 serving of fat, 2 cheese slices, and 3 ounces of meat that's lean.

With this high protein and carbohydrate breakfast, your body gets the start it needs in the morning. For the rest of the day, you would eat vegetables and protein. With the fiber in the vegetables and the slow digestion of the protein you'll feel full longer. The cravings will be cut down, because if you eat the sweets when the serotonin levels are high they won't taste as satisfying.

The study was comprised of 94 sedentary obese women who had metabolic syndrome. Half were put on the Big Breakfast Diet of about 1,240 calories. The other half ate a low carb, high protein diet of 1,085 calories for eight months.

Women who were on the stricter low carb diet lost about 9 pounds, while those on the Big Breakfast lost about 40. That means the low carb dieters lost 4.5% body mass, while those on the Big Breakfast lost 21.3%. These women also had fewer cravings during the day and actually felt less hungry.