“It was like a Bobby Flay-style throwdown, and I impressed the hell out of my husband.”

In Foster City, California, thirty-eight-year-old educator Brenda Trosin takes a shot of alcohol and mounts the elliptical machine for her workout. At 267 pounds, it’s often painful for her to exercise. She works out at home because she doesn’t want to be seen in public.

Growing up with a healthy weight, Brenda gained the “Freshman Fifteen” in college and continued to add eight to ten pounds per year for another decade. As her weight continued to noticeably increase year after year, she felt awkward mentoring her students in basic goal-setting principles. “If my students wanted to improve their reading skills, I preached time on task,” she says. “This lesson is true for weight loss as well, and I was fully neglecting that part of my life.

As she got older, her weight became too much to carry. “I was struggling with basic tasks, like sleeping, and I was always physically tired,” she says. “I received emails from my health insurance company, saying that I was eligible for bariatric surgery and inviting me to several orientations. It seemed quite wrong to modify an organ permanently to accommodate a lifetime of bad behaviors. I was very aware that I made myself fat. I owned my own mess. I did this to myself.”

Outwardly, Brenda had an amazing life: a great husband, a wonderful career, and a community of solid friendships. “But, internally, I had some work to do to clean up my head,” she says. “Slowly, I began to think that if I made myself fat, I might be able to make myself fit, too.”

It took Brenda a few months to figure out how to start, what to implement, and where to find helpful resources. Working for a large public library system with millions of items in its collection, she had access to unlimited information. “I started studying about nutrition, reading personal weight-loss stories for inspiration, identifying my bad habits, and trying to understand the impetus of my fatness,” she says. As she did her research, she discovered the NWCR, which provided behavior-based data.

Thinking she was too fat for most traditional fitness activities, Brenda decided to get an elliptical machine for her home. “I started with fifteen to twenty minutes of physical activity each day,” she says. “I logged every workout on a chart. My husband purchased the equipment for me, so I was committed to log thirty days of workouts to show my appreciation.”

After reaching her first thirty-day goal and seeing some improvements in her mobility, Brenda decided to keep going. After a few more months, she committed to doing 365 workouts in 365 days. (She missed only three or four days due to illness and travel during that first year.) With daily exercise now a habit, she began to address her nutrition. “During the first few months, I would implement a new behavior every few weeks, master that one, and add another one,” she says. “I meal prepped. I packed my lunches. I included one cheat meal per week. I weighed myself every day. I bought a Fitbit to track steps, downloaded the MyFitnessPal app to my phone to count calories, and started tracking everything. I learned to shop smarter, cook healthier, and embrace healthy living habits.”

***

Breakfast is my favorite meal. Ever since I was a kid, I have loved sugar cereals, pancakes, waffles, scrambled eggs, and hash browns; I could eat those foods all day. I often reminisce about going to International House of Pancakes (IHOP) restaurant on Sunday mornings as a kid to be treated to chocolate chip pancakes with boysenberry syrup and whipped cream, with a side of hash browns and scrambled eggs. Good times.

Although it’s not a good idea as adults to keep eating those foods for breakfast, and makes it more difficult to be a successful weight loser, it turns out that your mother (and her mother, and her mother) was right, after all—breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. Few other adages have better weathered the test of time.

Habit 5 of successful weight losers is eating breakfast. In the largest of the NWCR studies on this issue, breakfast-eating behaviors were studied in 2,959 registry members (79.5 percent women, 20.5 percent men).131 Seventy-eight percent eat breakfast every day, while only 4 percent never eat breakfast. These successful weight losers lost an average of 71.3 pounds (women lost 70.2 pounds and men lost 75.9 pounds) and maintained the NWCR-required minimum weight loss of thirty pounds for an average of six years. Of those who eat breakfast, 29.6 percent always eat cereal, 30.1 percent usually or often eat cereal, 20.6 percent sometimes eat cereal, and 19.7 percent rarely or never eat cereal. Also, 31.4 percent always eat fruit for breakfast, 24.2 percent usually or often eat fruit, 23.6 percent sometimes eat fruit, and 20.8 percent rarely or never eat fruit. Although nearly 80 percent of NWCR members eat breakfast, the researchers found no difference between breakfast eaters and non-breakfast eaters in the amount of weight lost (70.4 vs. 74.8 pounds, respectively) or in the duration of weight-loss maintenance (7.9 vs. 7.7 years, respectively). So, it’s possible to be a successful weight loser without eating breakfast; however, skipping breakfast is not the norm among the successful weight losers of the NWCR. Eating breakfast every day is also common among other successful weight losers: the NWCR’s sister registry in Portugal (Portuguese Weight Control Registry) has found that daily breakfast is one of their members’ most common strategies.132

Breakfast often takes a back seat or is forgotten altogether as people pay much more attention to its mid- and late-day counterparts of lunch and dinner. Most social events that include food are organized and planned around lunch and dinner; few social events include breakfast. Between 1965 and 1991, the proportion of US adults skipping breakfast increased from 14 percent to 25 percent,133 in part because of lack of time and a desire to control body weight. Skipping breakfast may seem logical as a weight maintenance strategy since controlling calories is one of the most important habits of successful weight losers. If you eat two meals per day instead of three, how could that not be a good idea?

Well, it’s not. Research has shown that the exact opposite is the case—skipping breakfast is actually associated with consuming more total daily calories.134 Skipping breakfast makes you hungry and therefore more likely to eat more later in the day to compensate. Breakfast-skippers also tend to weigh more than breakfast eaters, and obese individuals are more likely to skip breakfast. A study at the University of California, Berkeley, that examined the relationship between breakfast type, body mass index, and caloric intake using data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III, a large, population-based study conducted in the US from 1988 to 1994) found that people who skip breakfast have a higher body mass index, and people who eat cereal (cooked or ready-to-eat) or quick breads for breakfast have a significantly lower body mass index than people who eat other types of breakfast (e.g., meat and eggs).135 The scientists concluded, “It is clear from these and other data that skipping breakfast does not lead to attaining or maintaining a healthy weight.” This population-based study agrees with the successful weight-loss behavior of the NWCR, as 78 percent of members eat breakfast every day and, for 80 percent, that breakfast, at least sometimes, includes cereal.

In another study on calorie consumption at different times of the day, scientists at the University of Murcia in Spain discovered that individuals who consumed a greater percentage of their daily calories at breakfast and skipped breakfast less often lost more weight more quickly than did those who consumed a greater percentage of their daily calories later in the day and were breakfast-skippers.136 Another study at Tel Aviv University in Israel also found that a high-calorie breakfast results in greater weight loss than a high-calorie dinner.137 Scientists placed ninety-three overweight and obese women on two diets containing identical macronutrient content and composition equaling 1,400 calories for twelve weeks. The only difference was that one diet emphasized a big breakfast (50 percent of daily calories) and a small dinner (14 percent of daily calories) and the other diet emphasized a big dinner and a small breakfast by reversing the percentages. After twelve weeks, the women on the high-calorie breakfast lost nearly two and a half times more weight than those on the high-calorie dinner (nineteen vs. eight pounds, respectively). Waist circumference and body mass index also decreased more with the high-calorie breakfast than with the high-calorie dinner.

To see whether the macronutrient composition of breakfast influenced weight regain after losing weight, the scientists at Tel Aviv University placed 193 overweight and obese men and women on two diets for thirty-two weeks that differed in breakfast: a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate breakfast (300 calories; 10 grams of carbohydrate; 30 grams of protein) and a high-calorie, high-carbohydrate (and high-protein) breakfast (600 calories; 60 grams of carbohydrate; 45 grams of protein).138 Lunch and dinner were planned so that total daily calories were the same between diets. After the first sixteen weeks, both groups of individuals lost similar amounts of weight (six to seven pounds). However, after thirty-two weeks, the high-calorie/high-carb breakfast eaters lost an additional three pounds, while the low-calorie/low-carb breakfast eaters regained five pounds. Thus, the high-calorie/high-carb breakfast eaters were more successful weight losers on two accounts—they not only maintained their lost weight, they continued to lose weight. When the scientists compared factors related to hunger (e.g., satiety, cravings, and ghrelin, a hormone in the stomach that increases hunger) between the diets, they discovered that satiety was significantly higher and hunger and ghrelin were significantly lower in the high-calorie/high-carb breakfast eaters, suggesting that a high-calorie/high-carb (and high-protein) breakfast may be a more sustainable weight maintenance strategy.

So, no matter how busy you are in the morning to get your day started, skipping breakfast is not a good idea. Normal-weight and underweight individuals more evenly distribute their caloric intakes throughout the day. Eating breakfast is important for several reasons. When you first get out of bed in the morning, your blood glucose is on the low side of normal. Your body needs energy for the day’s activities. Since it has been many hours since your last meal, you need to break the fast, literally. The macronutrients you eat at breakfast will be used for their important jobs—carbohydrate will be used to replenish your blood glucose from your overnight fast to provide immediate fuel for your cells and to store muscle glycogen for later use; protein will be used to maintain the structural integrity of your cells and tissues and to transport nutrients in your blood; and fat will be used to provide energy, absorb fat-soluble vitamins, and maintain your body’s temperature. Because you are in a metabolically needy state when you get out of bed, all those calories from carbohydrate, protein, and fat that you eat at breakfast will be used to fulfill your body’s metabolic demands. Skipping breakfast only serves to deny your body the fuel it needs.

Creating the Habit

Having the intention to eat breakfast every day and telling yourself to eat breakfast every day is not enough to eat breakfast every day. To create the habit, you must create the right environment. Add repeated situational cues to your morning routine so that you eat breakfast every day. After a while, eating breakfast every day will become automatic as your brain associates the specific cues with breakfast. There are several ways to create the habit of eating breakfast every day:

1) Make breakfast a family event. Although mornings can be busy with getting ready for work and getting kids ready for school, breakfast is a great opportunity for family to meet together before starting the day. Sit down with your family at the kitchen table to eat breakfast every day with them. Families meetings at the table is a strong cue to engage in the behavior of eating breakfast. If everyone else is doing it, you don’t want to feel left out.

2) Set the kitchen or dining room table for tomorrow morning’s breakfast before going to bed. Put out the plates, the silverware, the glasses, and even the fancy cloth napkins. Make breakfast an event you look forward to.

3) Prepare breakfast the night before. Instead of sitting on the couch in the evening while watching reality TV, prepare breakfast for tomorrow morning. Make overnight oatmeal that you can reheat in the microwave in the morning or eat it right out of the refrigerator. Place a banana on the kitchen table so you see it when you walk into the kitchen. Hard boil some eggs for the week so you can easily grab an egg each morning. Focus your breakfast on carbohydrate and protein by placing those items in your line of sight.

4) Be hungry in the morning, both literally and figuratively. Don’t have late-night snacks after dinner so you will literally be hungry when you wake up and encouraged to eat breakfast and start your day, hungry to live an exceptional life.

5) Set a special alarm on your smartphone that you will associate with eating breakfast, perhaps your favorite inspirational song, or a song that reminds you of breakfast, like Deep Blue Something’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Melissa Steel’s Kisses for Breakfast.

***

Once Brenda Trosin started to lose a significant amount of weight, she decided to work with a fitness trainer at the gym. “I was still very uncomfortable being in public and trying something new,” she says. “I am not athletic by any means, so it was a challenge for me to overcome my own mental limitations. However, everyone was so kind and supportive that I did my best to focus on that energy. As a kid who failed physical education class in the sixth grade due to attendance issues, it felt wonderful to participate in sporting activities.”

One of Brenda’s friends encouraged her to train for an all-women’s 5K run in San Francisco. She weighed about two hundred pounds. “I was shocked to see that my fitness was decent enough to jog three miles,” she says. “I got hooked on running pretty quickly after that first race.” She transitioned from daily workouts on the elliptical machine to running “the mean streets of California,” as she puts it, with two- to four-mile runs before work each morning. Before the end of the year, she was training for a half-marathon, which she completed in 2014. “I was the chubbiest girl in the race,” she says, “but I placed well, given my total lack of experience. I found true joy in running, and I loved the community of runners in the Bay Area. Running is great therapy, so that became my best practice.”

Now forty-five years old and 185 pounds, Brenda no longer takes a shot of alcohol before her workouts to numb the pain. “Those initial sessions during the first month were incredibly painful for my knees and back,” she says. While she doesn’t recommend that approach to others, she says that when talking fitness with her trainers and fit friends, “there are two topics that they often overlook concerning overweight people: pain management is an essential part of a weight-loss program and compression garments are our best friends.”

All told, Brenda lost ninety pounds in two years, dropping her pants size from 26 to size 12. She currently lives near Orlando, Florida, and works for a publishing company as a financial resource administrator. Her weight is up slightly from the low 170s she weighed when she was running over thirty miles per week to train for a half-marathon. Even though Brenda is already a successful weight loser, having maintained nearly all her weight loss for more than five years, she’s not done. “I felt really proud once I hit that critical five-year milestone,” she says, “but I have a strong desire to lose more. I still dream of losing a full hundred pounds and mostly maintaining it. Everyone loves observing a project with visible progress.”

Brenda’s weight loss didn’t come without some side effects, both to her clothes and her friends. “There were a few unexpected outcomes of this effort,” she says. “I got creative with clothes for about two years because I could not afford to replace my entire wardrobe multiple times as I shrunk. I welcomed gently used clothes from my friends. I shopped secondhand consignment shops in affluent zip codes. I bought pants with ties. I found a good tailor. I also needed to replace all my shoes and get my jewelry resized. Some of my friendships were strained, and I even lost some casual friends along the way. With women, there always tends to be some subtle weight-based interactions. Once I quietly disrupted the pecking order of fatness within my circle, it changed the group dynamics.”

Brenda admits that maintaining her weight has been different than losing it. “Maintenance is much harder because no one really cares,” she says. “There is a very specific shift that happens for a fat-to-fit person, and it gets lonely at times when in maintenance mode. It’s a lifelong commitment and an ongoing struggle.”

To stay on track, Brenda has created many habits to maintain her weight. She prepares her meals days in advance. She eats breakfast. She stays hydrated. She embraces counting calories. She works out with friends. “These days, I do fewer thousand-calorie brunches,” she says. “I prefer walk-and-talks with my girlfriends instead, or we get together for longer training sessions on the turf.”

She also sets up several methods of accountability. She removes barriers. She exercises every day on a consistent schedule, from five to six thirty in the mornings Monday through Friday and eight to ten o’clock in the morning on weekends. “I used to tease that I was training for the Chubby Olympics,” she says. “Now, I train daily at a fantastic gym with amazing trainers and friends. If I’m having an off day, I still go to the gym to run on the treadmill. I adapt. I modify. I overcome. If my knees are unhappy that day, I switch to the elliptical machine. If that still hurts, I try the bike. Usually, I can work out the pains in a few minutes of moderate movement.”

A few years ago, Brenda learned that she will eventually need to have heart valve surgery. She currently takes medication and gets tested by her cardiologist every three to six months. Because of her heart condition, she monitors her heart rate to stay within safe guidelines and is required to be supervised while exercising. “Once I understood the seriousness of my heart condition, I had to shift my thinking from improving my running performance to learning to love running less competitively,” she says. “Now, I obsessively watch all the major marathons around the world and follow [marathon world record holder] Eliud Kipchoge for that running rush, but I will forever be restricted to running on a treadmill at a reasonable pace under observation. I miss running on the streets, but I am grateful to have a few more miles ahead of me with my underperforming heart. I am also trying to learn to love weightlifting, and I take group step and core classes at the gym. I have learned that I am resilient.”

Brenda sets many goals, writes them down, and celebrates them. In the beginning of her journey, she had incentive goals. “If I did ninety workouts in ninety days, I might treat myself to a new workout outfit,” she says. Now, to maintain her weight, she always has a weight-loss goal, a fitness goal, a vanity goal, a running goal, and a fun activity goal. “I want to lose twenty more pounds,” she says. “I want to deadlift 160 pounds. I want to shop at White House Black Market. I want to run the Golden Gate Bridge. I want to jump on a trampoline. Some goals might take a year to reach, so it helps to have other, smaller goals.”

When asked what advice she has for others, Brenda says, “Find people and activities that bring you joy. Be brave. Tackle new challenges. Find a fitness mentor and mentor someone else. Those relationships help to keep you engaged and energized.”

Brenda’s weight-loss and maintenance journey has been nothing short of transformative. She has found a confidence she didn’t have before. “Overall, I can do some amazing shit!” Brenda exclaims. “We recently bought a large safe for our house that weighs over three hundred pounds. I confidently told my husband that I was good for my half of the lift if he could knock out his half. It was like a [celebrity chef] Bobby Flay-style throwdown, and I impressed the hell out of my husband.”

Habit 5

Eat Breakfast.