Why Skipping Breakfast Is Not the Best Idea

About 60% of teenagers skip breakfast at least 3 times a week. And females skip over three times the rate of males. The most common reason for skipping breakfast is not having enough time. Yet 22% of teenage girls say they skip meals because they are "on a diet." It is a seemingly normal practice for women and girls who want to loose weight to skip breakfast and sometimes even lunch, believing the all too common myth "eating less leads to less fat." This is entirely untrue. In fact, eating less not only completely deprives your body of everything it needs to function, but leads to weight gain in the long run. When surveyed, a good portion of people in this room, myself included, said that you skip a meal (usually breakfast) every so often. Some of you said you don't eat breakfast at all. This is where modern living and human needs clash. In this "new day and age" and all, everything is busy. Everything is fast. There's no more time for breakfast, let alone your personal life. But you still need to eat. Your body and your well being demand it. Say you were to eat dinner at 7 o'clock. You wake up at 6:30 the next morning, skip breakfast, and don't eat lunch until noon. You've just gone 17 hours without eating. Does that sound like a lot? It should. You've just starved yourself, intentionally or not, for more than the length of a normal waking day. And what if your lunch is minimal? Or even worse, non existent? You know that stereotypical situation? The one all of us have seen in action? The table of 10 or so 12 to 14 year old girls all sharing a school supplied, plastic-box salad? And remember, these are middle schoolers we're talking about. Skipping meals leads to low blood sugar. Your body needs sugar to do everything a body needs to, like moving or thinking. And according to Graham Hiscott, the number of girls ages 14 to 15 skipping lunch has increased nine-fold since 1984. Though this is a British study, the numbers are similar everywhere. More teens are