There are a lot of reasons why people skip meals. They’re too busy in the morning to eat breakfast. They get caught up in a project or activity and forget to eat. They forget their lunch at home and don’t have good takeout options near their workplace. They don’t have strong hunger cues. They have meetings or a million emails to answer around lunchtime. They’re doing intermittent fasting. They’re dieting and trying to compensate for a “too big” meal earlier. They have an eating disorder.
Missing a meal occasionally — maybe you’re sick, or traveling, or are dealing with an emergency and eating has to go on the back burner — isn’t a big deal, generally speaking. But when skipping meals happens frequently, even habitually, there are some real risks.
Food and your mood
One is the negative effect on mood. When you go too long without eating, your body produces extra cortisol, a stress hormone. It does this to try to regulate the drop in your blood sugar, but it also increases the body’s stress levels. (If you ever get hangry, this may make a lot of sense.)
Over time, skipping meals or simply not eating enough can make you feel more stressed and anxious. If you struggle with depression, it could make those symptoms worse, too.
This is why eating enough is so important in eating disorder recovery — a starving brain is a more rigid and anxious brain.
Food provides energy, so when you’re not eating enough, your brain and body aren’t getting the fuel they need to run optimally. It’s no coincidence that my eating disorder clients tell me how much better they feel and how much more present they are with friends, family, coworkers, when they start eating more (even if eating more still feels hard).
Cravings, hunger and fullness
Your body needs food at regular intervals, and it tries to tell you that through hunger cues. When you ignore those cues by skipping meals, your body may stop sending them. It’s like your body says, “Why should I bother…they never listen anymore.”
When I client tells me they don’t eat breakfast because they don’t feel hungry in the morning, once we do some sleuthing, the truth is often revealed — they don’t feel hungry because they’ve been skipping breakfast for so long. Sometimes for years.
But dead hunger cues don’t mean you don’t need to eat. Your body still needs fuel. And in the interest of trying to protect you, your body will fight back. It might do this by slowing your metabolism, but first it’s going to try to get you to eat.
Skipping meals and undereating can also trigger cravings and other intrusive food thoughts, aka “food noise.” Not only can this feel annoying and overwhelming, it takes up mental space that you could otherwise be devoting to other things. It makes your world smaller.
Finally, your hunger, whether dormant or simply ignored, can build and grow to the point where it becomes primal. You’ll want to eat whatever isn’t nailed down. Because you’re so hungry, because you feel like you have this gaping empty pit in your stomach, it’s very easy to quickly eat past the point of comfortable fullness. Possibly to the point of feeling out of control.
So not only can skipping meals make you lose touch with hunger cues, you can lose touch with fullness cues, too.
Circadian rhythms and chronic disease
From a broader health perspective, skipping breakfast can contribute to a misalignment of your circadian rhythms (internal clocks). Evolving research strongly suggests that this misalignment can increase our risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other health conditions, and that when we eat plays a role. Why? Because our bodies are designed to eat and be active during the day and fast and rest at night.
When you get up in the morning, your heart, liver and other organs start working harder for you. That means they need fuel. Because of this, your body more effectively uses calories and carbohydrates earlier in the day, which helps support stable blood sugar levels. That’s one reason why skipping breakfast can disrupt circadian rhythms.
Another is that while exposure to light is the strongest factor for syncing your body with its environment — it resets the clock in your brain, then that clock sends out signals to help reset the clocks in your organs — when we eat is a second factor.
In studies where researchers force the misalignment of these synchronizing signals — participants are exposed to light and then eat 12 hours later — they find that some organs get confused because they perceive both signals and get pulled in opposite directions.
Let’s say you skip breakfast and lunch, then eat dinner at 8 or 9 p.m. Your brain will still be synced to the light-dark cycle, but many of the peripheral clocks in your organs won’t be. If you eat at the wrong time of the day, those clocks will ignore the light signal to a certain extent and instead reset to the food intake pattern. That's a big problem, because now you have an internal misalignment of your biological clocks.
A 2023 study found that eating fewer than three times per day and having a nighttime fasting duration of less than 10 hours or more than 14 hours were each associated with an increased risk of premature death from cardiovascular and other causes. Why? Because…
- Participants with a longer fasting duration tended to eat their last meal of the day earlier, which could be positive, but they also tended to eat their first meal later, which could be detrimental.
- Those with a short overnight fast ate breakfast early and dinner late.
- Participants who ate fewer than three meals per day tended to have irregular meal times, which could make it difficult for the body to prepare for incoming nutrients.
So, no, skipping meals, whether intentionally or accidentally (because you forgot to eat), isn’t a benign behavior.
Disclaimer: All information provided here is of a general nature and is furnished only for educational purposes. This information is not to be taken as medical or other health advice pertaining to an individual’s specific health or medical condition. You agree that the use of this information is at your own risk.
Until next time,
