I basically never eat breakfast and see no negative effect, but when I tell people this they immediately get concerned about my wellbeing. The "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" idea is deeply ingrained in our culture.
I listened to the advice of family and friends for the early part of my life and ate breakfast as others do, but it always made me feel a bit bloated, and then shortly after, actually hungry where I wouldn't have been otherwise.
Left to my own devices I do not eat in the morning, I just drink perhaps a coffee, but mostly water and green tea. I'll start getting hungry a few hours after waking up, which is ideal because that is right around lunch time.
Then I'll eat after work, or after my thrice-weekly lifting session, with perhaps a small snack later on. Usually something like cheese, cucumber and chutney on wholegrain crackers.
My stomach just does not seem 'awake' in the mornings and never has done. When I did eat in the morning it always felt like a bit of a chore.
I'm read somewhere once that hunter-gatherer humans never really ate in the morning either, and our bodies go through some process/reaction after waking from sleep that gives us a burst of energy, enough to go out and forage or hunt, and that eating first thing in the morning is a recent thing in our evolution.
Makes perfect sense to me given my own personal experience.
I typically do better having breakfast, a hearty breakfast allows me to have a light lunch without heavy cravings. I've tried skipping breakfast with mixed results. I've also tried moving my eating period to breakfast & lunch with skipping dinner with some positive results, although it can be tough when I'm with others eating or drinking after work.
I do agree though, that the concept of breakfast being important is bunk. Everyone is different and as these IF studies show, no one meal is all that important.
But it makes me think too, other cultures have a strong emphasis on breakfast, and that doesn't necessarily include cereals (but it would include bread). Like France, Germany, and Finland.
I'm in Ireland, where people are definitely under the Kellogg's influence.
It's not so conspiranoic; the agri-lobby managed to get cereals and grains (+pasta) in the base of the food pyramid, where it should be at the top, since they're essentialy refined carbs.
Granted, in the 50s we didn't have the same scientific knowledge as we do today, but the food pyramid was "invented" by them for their own benefit, make no mistake. Remember when butter was good for you because it lubricated your arteries?[1] Or when doctors were associated with smoking?[2]
This sort of propaganda easily permeates into popular culture and can cause a lot of harm. Refined carbs are 90% guilty of the worldwide obesity pandemic.
""[I]n many ways, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started," Lenna F. Cooper, B.S., writes in a 1917 issue of Good Health, the self-proclaimed "oldest health magazine in the world" edited by none other than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the co-inventor of flaked cereal. "It should not be eaten hurriedly, and all the family, so far as possible, should partake of it together. And above all, it should be made up of easily digested foods, and balanced in such a way that the various food elements are present in the right proportions. It should not be a heavy meal, consisting of over five to seven hundred calories," Cooper's article continues.
Granted, Kellogg did hold an M.D. degree, but there's no denying he had a product to sell."
"It should not be a heavy meal, consisting of over five to seven hundred calories" is still good advice. That's about how big my breakfast is. Yes, I weigh it and count the calories.
