Does Breakfast Help You Lose Weight and Boost Your Metabolism? Here's What an Expert Says

Regardless of how much you already know about metabolism, here are a few important points to remember. First, it's a very complex process that deals with how your body produces energy from protein, fat, and carbohydrates/sugars and how it stores that energy. Second, when people talk about their metabolism, they're really referring to their metabolic rate: how much energy/calories your body burns in a day. Metabolic rate is not to be confused with your resting metabolic rate, which is how many calories your body needs at rest for basic functions like breathing.

Now that we've covered the basics, it's back to how breakfast affects your metabolic rate. Because your metabolic rate — in its most simplified term — is how much energy/calories you burn in a day, it's fair to assume that if you eat in the morning, you're going to burn more calories throughout the day. "It's partially true and partially wrong," Dr. Arad told POPSUGAR.

"Because when we do eat, the body processes food and there is an increase, a small increase, in the amount of energy that the body burns. Just because the body needs to process that food," he explained. Don't get too excited yet. According to Dr. Arad, "the increase is so small — it's about five to 10 percent of your baseline — that the amount of calories that you eat certainly makes that increase not significant."

If you burned one calorie per minute without eating breakfast, your metabolic rate would probably increase to two calories per minute by eating breakfast, Dr. Arad said. In an hour, you're probably burning 60 more calories. You may be thinking, "Well, burning more calories is great, isn't it?" But here's the thing: what you eat for breakfast will offset this extra caloric burn because we usually eat large breakfasts, he explained. "We're eating a lot of calories. So the increase in metabolism, in energy expenditure, it's certainly not what's going to help us lose the weight," he said. Ultimately, "the amount of energy your body is going to burn [by eating breakfast] is not going to be that significant."

If you're looking to significantly increase your metabolic rate, there are a few expert-approved things that work. First, begin strength training and building muscle. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, which means the more muscle you have, the more calories you'll burn in a day. Here's a metabolism-boosting workout and a four-week strength-training workout plan to get you started. Dr. Arad also recommends doing cardio to help boost your metabolism since you will be expending more energy and burning more calories per workout.

When it comes to your nutrition, there are a few key things you can do. Eating more protein and foods with healthy fat will make it harder for your body to process, digest, and store them, which means your body will be expending more energy to do so. You should also minimize the amount of processed sugar you're eating. This is because sugar has a relatively low thermic effect (it's super easy for your body to break down) compared to fat and protein.