Clean-Plate Club

You were never a breakfast eater, so in the morning you just grab a cup of coffee. Lunch? No time—you nibble a cookie between meetings. After a long flight, you get to the hotel just in time for the cocktail reception and dinner that precede the next day’s conference. You’re so hungry you inhale every hors d’oeuvre in sight, plus cocktails, the entrée, and dessert. Who knows how many calories you’ve just consumed. But it doesn’t matter, because you haven’t eaten all day, right?

Wrong.

It might sound counterintuitive, but one of the fastest ways to gain weight is to skip meals, nutritionists say, because it makes us more likely to overeat—and to eat the wrong foods—when we finally do. “Skipped meals almost always lead to dealing with your weight at some point,” says Karen Husu, a Lino Lakes–based dietician with her own private practice.

Yet because of hectic work schedules, more of us are doing this every day. Nearly 4 out of 10 people skip breakfast. And according to an A. C. Nielsen Poll, 1 in 3 people skip lunch at least once a week, too, while 1 in 10 never eat lunch. The problem is especially pervasive among business executives, who make up the majority of Husu’s clients.

“The biggest challenge really is fitting meals in between all of their meetings,” she says. And in training our bodies to go all day without eating, many of us are forgetting a food fundamental: Our bodies need it for fuel—preferably at intervals of no more than five hours during the day. Going too long without food causes blood sugars to drop, leaving us feeling fatigued.

“Fatigue makes people more prone to grab quick carbs and snacky food” in the afternoon, Husu says. And those foods, eaten when we’re really hungry, release a natural protein in our bodies called neuropeptide Y, which can trigger a binge. When that happens, and we’ve eaten a bunch of empty calories that don’t fill us up, we’ll still tend to eat a big dinner, and maybe even snack our way through the evening. The resulting weight gain has people turning to the latest diet craze as a quick fix, or cutting too far back on calories.

“They think they have to skimp and skimp,” Husu says, which also eventually backfires. It’s a dieting mentality that can adversely affect your health. After the Atkins Diet craze, for example, doctors referred patients to Husu who had lost weight, but then developed high cholesterol as a result of the high-fat, low-carbohydrate Atkins regimen. “They didn’t know what to eat,” Husu says. “They couldn’t let go of that high-protein mentality.”