How Skipping Meals Can Hurt Your Weight Loss Journey

Key Takeaways

• Skipping meals is a common weight-loss strategy: Some people reduce meal frequency in an effort to lower calorie intake.
• Meal skipping may affect hunger and energy levels: Long gaps without eating can influence appetite, focus, and food choices later in the day.
• Not everyone responds the same way to meal timing: Age, activity level, health conditions, and lifestyle habits may all affect individual results.
• Food quality still matters: Nutrient-dense meals with protein, fiber, and healthy fats are often emphasized regardless of eating schedule.
• Sustainable habits are an important consideration: Long-term eating patterns are generally viewed as more impactful than short-term restriction.

It’s the new year, which means that millions of Americans now have a common resolution in mind: to lose weight.

While the desire to lose weight can be given a bad reputation, there is nothing inherently wrong with it. After all, being at a healthy weight can be one marker of good health. Yet how you go about the desired weight loss is what really matters and makes the most difference.

Since many people believe that they have to eat fewer calories to lose weight — spoiler, it doesn’t always work that way, and here’s why — they tend to adopt habits like skipping meals as a method to do this. But does skipping meals really work for weight loss? In theory, it seems like it could. But in reality, it’s likely one of the worst things you can do for your weight loss journey.

Skipping Meals and Weight Loss: Why It Slows Your Progress

Before we dive into the potential dangers of skipping meals, it’s important to clarify that skipping meals may not always be intentional. Sometimes, you may get caught up doing other things and simply don’t have time or forget to eat a meal. While that isn’t a habit you’ll want to repeat very often, it may be inevitable on occasion. And that’s okay. For the purpose of this article, we are referring to intentionally skipping meals for the purpose of cutting calories or losing weight.

Here are a few of the downsides of skipping meals:

1. It’s likely to backfire.

You may have positive intentions when you choose to skip meals. But in reality, it’s not sustainable. Your body has been trained to expect food, however many times you tend to feed it. So when you make sudden changes to that schedule — i.e., skipping a meal — your body is going to react.

In many cases, you might make up for the lost calories by overeating at your next meal. Or, you may become so hungry that you either give in to eating the meal anyway, or you consume extra snacks to try to fill in the gaps of the food you didn’t eat at the meal. Either way, you will likely end up consuming at least the same amount — but oftentimes even more — calories than you would have if you had just eaten a normal meal to begin with.

2. It can slow down your metabolism.

Cutting calories by skipping meals can slow down your metabolic rate. Your metabolism is responsible for the amount of calories your body burns each day, so a slower metabolism means fewer calories burned. When you go longer periods of time without food, your body may think it needs to go into starvation mode. This means it may slow down your metabolism and increase your fat storage as a means to preserve energy.

In fact, one study done on people in Japan found that people who skip breakfast are actually more likely to become obese than people who don’t skip it. This was true even if their total calorie intake was lower. The same might be true for other meals skipped as well. Another recent study confirmed that people who eat breakfast tend to lose more weight than people who don’t. Of course, what you eat matters as well. Yet the overall point is that eating normal meals throughout the day is actually better for your metabolism than skipping meals.

3. It can mess with your hormones.

Skipping meals — which is a form of fasting — is a stressor on the body. It can raise cortisol levels, your body’s main stress hormone. Too much stress can be harmful for your body in many ways, including increasing inflammation that can lead to disease.

Plus, skipping meals can be particularly harmful to women of reproductive age. Research has shown that skipping meals can interfere with hormones that regulate menstruation. So, skipping meals may cause things like irregular menstrual cycles and menstrual disorders, including amenorrhea, or loss of your period without being pregnant.

What About Intermittent Fasting for Weight Loss?

Intermittent fasting became more well-known and popular in recent years. While it is touted for a variety of potential health benefits, one of the main reasons people followed it was for weight loss. Yet since intermittent fasting involves skipping meals — as you would be following strict eating hours and fasting during the rest — it’s not an ideal method for weight loss. You may experience short-term weight loss, but as outlined earlier, the practice is likely to backfire, and the weight loss probably won’t last.

Note that if you’re someone who inadvertently practices intermittent fasting — such as people who regularly skip breakfast and have done so for years — there may not be any downsides to this practice. This is because your body has had plenty of time to adapt to that eating habit, and your metabolism has adjusted. But if you don’t currently practice fasting of any kind, doing so for weight loss isn’t a good idea.

In Summary

Skipping meals is a common, yet often unproductive, method of losing weight. There are many downsides of skipping meals, including their potential to actually lead to overeating and slow down your metabolism, which can both lead to unwanted weight gain. Rather than skipping meals, you are better off following healthy and balanced eating habits that include each meal of the day. This, followed by adequate physical activity, is still the best formula for weight loss.

All in all, nutrition for weight loss is highly individualized. That’s why working with a registered dietitian is your best bet to help you create an eating plan that is right for you. 

References:

1. Duan, D., Pilla, S. J., Michalski, K., Laferrère, B., Clark, J. M., & Maruthur, N. M. (2022). Eating breakfast is associated with weight loss during an intensive lifestyle intervention for overweight/obesity. Obesity, 30(2), 378–388. 
2. Kim, B. H., Joo, Y., Kim, M. S., Choe, H. K., Tong, Q., & Kwon, O. (2021). Effects of intermittent fasting on the circulating levels and circadian rhythms of hormones. Endocrinology and Metabolism, 36(4), 745–756. 
3. Most, J., & Redman, L. M. (2020). Impact of calorie restriction on energy metabolism in humans. Experimental Gerontology, 133, Article 110875. 
4. Watanabe, Y., Saito, Isao., Henmi, I., Yoshimura, K., Maruyama, K., Yamauchi, K., Matsuo, T., Kato, T., Tanigawa, T., Kishida, T., & Asada, Y. (2014). Skipping breakfast is correlated with obesity. Journal of Rural Medicine, 9(2), 51–58.