A big mistake that is made by many people trying to lose weight is skipping breakfast believing that by skipping a meal they can help increase weight loss. Unfortunately skipping breakfast can have exactly the opposite effect upon losing weight because any time your body is starved of food it will go into survival mode and begin to break down muscle to use for energy which is extremely detrimental to reducing body fat and achieving long term weight loss success. The very name breakfast means to break the fast that you were in during the night while you were sleeping. The problem with any type of prolonged fast is that any time the body senses an absence of regular food it will begin to take steps to make sure that you do not run out of fuel for energy. Since your fat stores are actually your final energy reserves your body will begin to protect these reserves by using more energy from other sources and muscle becomes the primary target. Any time you lose muscle you reduce your metabolism which is exactly the opposite of what you want for weight loss. The way to avoid losing muscle due to this response by your body is to make sure that you always provide your body with a steady supply of food so that it never reverts into survival mode. The fast that naturally occurs when you sleep every night is relatively harmless to your muscle because your demands for energy are so low and as long as you quickly break the fast first thing in the morning after waking you do not have to worry about losing muscle from overnight sleeping . So learn to eat breakfast every morning whether you are hungry or not because it is too important to eat something so as to protect your precious muscle that keeps you burning fat all of the time.