Breakfast Chocolate Dessert

If you happen to be enjoying your breakfast at the moment, jump for joy! And get that piece of chocolate cake. Or you can go for the chocolate chip cookie jar. If ice cream sounds better, help yourself. Sounds ridiculous? I’ll prove you wrong, with the help of the groundbreaking research at Tel Aviv University.

Such research claimed that having dessert with a balanced 600-calorie breakfast that has carbohydrates and proteins will allow people dieting to shed some unwanted pounds and maintain it.

Researchers sorted 193 clinically obese, non-diabetic adults out into two groups. These groups were provided with the same low-carbohydrate diets of 1,400 calories every day for women and 1,600 calories a day for men. One group, however, was provided with a low-carbohydrate 300-calorie breakfast and the other was given a 600-calorie breakfast that has carbs and protein, and consistently came with a dessert.

Losing weight was pretty much the same for the two groups at the first 16 weeks. However after 32 weeks, those that had dessert, like cake or cookies, with breakfast had dropped around 40 pounds more than those that had the lighter, low-carbohydrate breakfast.

“What you eat for breakfast does not make you fat,” according to professor Daniela Jakubowicz, part of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Diabetes Unit at Wolfson Medical Center. She claimed that morning meals give the energy that you can use the entire day, boost one’s metabolism and assist thinking processes. If a low-calorie diet limits carbohydrates in the morning, metabolism crashes. Thus, the body tends to compensate which ultimately promotes increase in weight in the event that you have carbohydrates later. And that will happen because you are likely to starve come lunchtime. “Breakfast increases metabolism and decreases hunger,” she added.

Serotonin, which is a natural chemical that contributes to positive feelings like happiness, has elevated levels in the morning yet drops come afternoon. By eating chocolate in the afternoon, the level of serotonin in the body boosts up which in turn has an anti-depressive effect. That being said, you’re more likely to eat dessert the following afternoon once your serotonin levels fall.

“Chocolate in the morning maintains the serotonin levels during the day, so you don’t feel depressed,” Jakubowicz said. “When you think of the chocolate you ate in the morning, you don’t remember that it made you happy because when you ate it your serotonin level was up. The dependence on the chocolate begins to decrease.”