Should You Eat Breakfast If You’re Not Hungry In The Morning?

Breakfast is the most over-hyped meal of the day.

There is nothing wrong with eating breakfast, nor is there anything great about skipping it, but the hoopla about breakfast being ‘the most important meal’ or ‘setting you up for the day’ is misguided. Whether you eat breakfast or not should depend only on your preference.

Keep in the mind the question we are answering is should you eat breakfast if you are not hungry in the morning?

If you are hungry in the morning, you should eat breakfast. There are some people who can wait an hour or so and the hunger will subside, but on the most part, if you feel the need to eat in the morning, you should.

Some people do not feel hungry in the morning but find themselves force-feeding a morning meal because of the supposed breakfast benefits, even if they do not enjoy it. This can change if you want to.

So long as you can get through until lunch or a mid-morning snack — whatever you usually do — without your energy levels dropping or hunger becoming a distraction, you can skip breakfast and wait until later in the day to eat.

This can be a useful way of managing your energy intake because the energy you save from eating in the morning can be deployed later in the day. You then have a larger portion size at lunch and dinner, or maybe an afternoon snack that would otherwise not fit.

Using meal timing to personalise your nutrition strategy is an important part of finding the right approach for you. It makes sense to not eat when you are not hungry and save room in your energy budget for later in the day.

It is not just breakfast that this applies to — you might find that you are not hungry during the day and prefer a smaller lunch, or that you function best with larger meals throughout the day and a smaller dinner.

The key to finding out what approach works for you is to try some different approaches. Often we think we know what works for us, but then we are surprised at how well something else can go.

When trialling a nutrition strategy, give yourself at least seven days with the new approach to see how effective it is. You also need to make sure that you are sticking to it, because if you are testing no breakfast but end up having it twice during the week. It can a little while for your body to adjust to the changes, which makes it vital to be consistent with the approach you are trialling.

In summary, breakfast is just another meal and no more important than any other. If you are not hungry in the morning and would prefer to skip breakfast and eat larger meals later in the day, you certainly can do that, just be sure to try any changes for at least a week to see how it suits you.