Coffee Breakfast

Stop me if you’ve heard this before… but before you click out, keep reading – it gets interesting. Eating a big breakfast with copious amounts of (gulp) carbs and protein, followed by a low carb, low calorie diet the rest of the day has shown some pretty promising results – and get this; obliterates the low carb only! This according to a new study presented at The Endocrine Society’s 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

I will now attempt to break this down in the simplest terms possible (so that I can understand what I’ve written).According to the study’s lead author, Daniela Jakubowicz, MD, of the Hospital de Clinicas, Caracas, Venzezuela – the key to successful long-term weight loss diet depends on its ability to increase a sense of fullness and bring down carb cravings. Jakubowicz claims that strict low carb diets exacerbate carb cravings and fail long term. Here are the details of the study:

Participants: 94 Obese, inactive females.

Group I: Very low carb dieters

• 1, 085 calories a day.
• 17 grams of carbohydrates
• 51 grams of protein and
• 78 grams of fat a day.
• The smallest meal was breakfast, at 290 calories. For breakfast the dieters were permitted only 7 grams of carbohydrates, such as bread, fruit, cereal and milk. Dieters could eat just 12 grams of protein, such as meat and eggs, in the morning.

Group II: Big breakfast dieters

• 1, 240 calories a day.
• 58 grams of carbohydrates
• 93 grams of protein
• 46 grams of fat
• Dieters ate a 610-calorie big breakfast, consisting of 58 grams of carbs, 47 grams of protein and 22 fat grams. The diet schedule for lunch was 395 calories (34, 28 and 13 grams of carbs, protein and fat, respectively); dinner was 235 calories (5, 18 and 26 grams, respectively).

The Results

The first 4 months of the 8 month study focused on weight loss, while the last 4 months focused on weight maintenance. Here were the results:

First 4 months:

Very low carb group: Average 28 lbs loss
Big Breakfast group: Average 23 lbs loss

After 8 months:

Very low carb group: Regained 18 lbs
Big Breakfast group: Lost an additional 16.5 lbs

The big breakfast group lost an average of 21% body weight while the very low carb group lost only 4.5%.

What to make of this

I personally was shocked at the disparity between groups. The regain in the very low carb group seems consistent with other longer-term studies (although those studies still show a better net loss in the low carb group). One thing that is glaring in the study is how much more protein the big breakfast group was eating – my guess is that protein is the key. Both diets are low in calories and carbs, so it would only make sense that the higher protein big-breakfast eaters would have better satiety and would therefore be able to sustain this type of diet.

I would like to see this study duplicated in a free feeding (ad libitum) situation – keep the ratios the same but do not restrict calories.