“I want to start 16-hour fasting, but which is better: skipping breakfast or eating dinner earlier?”
“I’ve heard skipping breakfast is bad for you. Is that true?”
When you decide to give intermittent fasting (IF) a try, this question of scheduling is the first thing most people get stuck on.
There’s no single right answer, but each option has its own pros and cons, and each suits a different type of person.
From here, I’ll clearly explain the pros and cons of choosing to skip breakfast for 16-hour fasting, how it differs from eating dinner earlier, how to choose the one that fits you, and tips for sticking with it.
Use this article to find the method that works for you.
- 1 What’s the Difference Between Skipping Breakfast and Eating Dinner Early (Skipping Dinner) in 16-Hour Fasting?
- 2 The Benefits of Choosing to Skip Breakfast for 16-Hour Fasting
- 3 The Drawbacks and Precautions of Skipping Breakfast for 16-Hour Fasting
- 4 The Pros and Cons of the Early-Dinner (Skip-Dinner) Pattern
- 5 Skipping Breakfast vs. Eating Dinner Early: Which Is Easier to Stick With? How to Choose
- 6 Tips for Sticking with Skipping Breakfast for 16-Hour Fasting, and a Sample Day
- 7 Frequently Asked Questions About Skipping Breakfast for 16-Hour Fasting
- 8 Choose the 16-Hour Fasting Pattern That Fits Your Daily Rhythm
What’s the Difference Between Skipping Breakfast and Eating Dinner Early (Skipping Dinner) in 16-Hour Fasting?
16-hour fasting is a method where you eat nothing for 16 hours of the day and have your meals within the remaining 8 hours.
Among the forms of intermittent fasting, it’s known as the easiest one to work into your life.
The key point is that you can include your sleeping hours in the 16-hour fasting period.
For example, if you sleep 7 hours, you only have to hold out for about the remaining 9 hours while you’re awake.
Here, it splits broadly into two patterns depending on which meal you cut back.
First, let’s lay out the basics of the two patterns.
Pattern A: Skip Breakfast (e.g., Eat from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.)
This is a style where you keep fasting from the moment you wake up until lunch.
Since your sleeping hours count too, the actual “hungry and struggling” time is only a few hours from morning until noon.
- 📅 Fasting: 8 p.m. to 12 p.m. the next day (16 hours)
- 🍽️ Eating window: 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. (8 hours)
- 👍 No restrictions on evening meals; easy to fit in drinks with friends and eating out
Pattern B: Eat Dinner Earlier (e.g., Eat from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.)
This is a style where you eat a proper breakfast and finish dinner at an early hour, such as 4 p.m.
You fast from the evening through the next morning.
- 📅 Fasting: 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. the next day (16 hours)
- 🍽️ Eating window: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (8 hours)
- 👍 You can move energetically from the morning; easy to align with your body clock
The Difference Between the Two Patterns
Both have the same 16-hour fasting period, but they differ in whether you eat during “the second half of the day” or “the first half of the day.”
If you compare it to a shop, skipping breakfast is a way of “opening later,” and eating dinner earlier is a way of “closing earlier.”
Even if the shop is closed for the same length of time, which hours it’s open changes how customers (meals) come in and how easy it is to clean up afterward.
For your body, “cleaning up” means digesting what you ate, processing the sugar in your blood, and starting to use fat for energy during the fasting period.
It’s said that the longer the fasting period, the more readily the body turns stored fat into fuel.
Also, you don’t need to stick to “12 p.m. to 8 p.m.”; it’s fine to shift it earlier or later to fit your life, such as 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. or 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.
What matters is to start eating at roughly the same time every day and finish eating at roughly the same time.
By the way, “skipping dinner” may sound like eating nothing at all at night, but in practice, “finishing dinner early” is more realistic than actually skipping dinner.
In this article, too, I’ll introduce the approach of finishing dinner by early evening under the name “early-dinner pattern.”
Whichever pattern you choose, the basic idea of 16-hour fasting doesn’t change.
Think of the difference as “how well it fits your daily rhythm” and “at what time of day you’re more likely to feel hungry.”
The Benefits of Choosing to Skip Breakfast for 16-Hour Fasting
This “skip breakfast” pattern is the one many IF practitioners choose.
The reason is simple: it’s the easiest to fit into a modern daily rhythm.
Let’s look at the main benefits of the skip-breakfast pattern.
- ✅ No restrictions on evening meals, so it’s easy to fit in eating out and drinks with friends
- ✅ Suits people who are too busy in the morning to eat
- ✅ Easy to get through with just black coffee or green tea
- ✅ You can eat whenever you like from lunchtime on
Benefit 1: Easy to Fit Around Family and Work Dinners
Dinner is often eaten with family or friends, and there are also times you eat out in the evening for work.
Skipping breakfast lets you keep your dinner time as it is, so your daily rhythm is less likely to get out of sync with the people around you.
Not having the awkwardness of being “the only one not eating dinner” is a big reassurance when it comes to sticking with it.
Benefit 2: You Gain Some Breathing Room in the Morning
Since you no longer need time to prepare or eat breakfast, you gain about 10 to 20 minutes of breathing room on busy mornings.
You can use that time to get ready, do some light stretching, or slowly sip plain hot water.
When your morning routine becomes simpler, your daily stress may get a little lighter.
Benefit 3: Easy to Build Your Fasting Period Around Sleep
If you finish dinner at 8 p.m., most of your fasting period passes while you sleep.
Many people don’t have much of an appetite in the morning to begin with, so morning hunger may bother you less than you’d expect.
Because all you have to do is “hold out from waking up until lunch,” it’s one of the lowest-hurdle ways to fast.
Benefit 4: Easy to Start If You Usually Don’t Eat Breakfast
If you normally just have coffee in the morning anyway, all it takes to complete a 16-hour fast is paying attention to when you finish eating at night.
Tidying up a habit you already have is much easier than building a new one.
The biggest strength of the skip-breakfast pattern is that you can start without making big changes to your current life.
For beginners who think, “I just want to try fasting first,” it’s an easy method to choose as a starting point.
I myself started with this pattern from the very beginning.
I got used to a routine of just drinking coffee in the morning, heading to work, and eating my first meal at lunch surprisingly quickly.
The first week was a little tough, but from the second week on, morning hunger hardly bothered me at all.
The Drawbacks and Precautions of Skipping Breakfast for 16-Hour Fasting
Skipping breakfast is easy to stick with, but there are also drawbacks to watch out for.
If you do it the wrong way, it can leave you feeling that “it’s not working as well as I expected,” so it’s best to know about them up front.
- ⚠️ You’re more likely to feel hungry from morning to noon
- ⚠️ It may not suit work or study that requires concentration from the morning
- ⚠️ If you tend to eat late at night, your eating window tends to drift toward the evening
Drawback 1: Your Blood Sugar Can Spike at Lunch
After a long fasting period, your body is like a dry sponge, ready to soak up whatever you eat.
If you then load up all at once on a carb-heavy meal such as a rice bowl, ramen, or sweet pastries, your blood sugar (the amount of sugar in your blood) tends to spike.
When your blood sugar shoots up and then crashes, it can cause sleepiness and sluggishness after meals, and make you hungry again soon.
At lunch, I recommend eating vegetables and protein first and saving carbohydrates for later.
Drawback 2: It’s Easy to Fall Short on Protein
When you go down to two meals a day, the total amount you eat inevitably decreases.
In particular, when foods you used to have at breakfast, such as eggs, dairy products, and natto (fermented soybeans), drop out, you tend to run short on protein.
In fact, in an overseas study (published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2020) in which participants followed 16-hour fasting, eating from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m., for 12 weeks,
there was no major difference in weight loss compared with a group that ate three regular meals a day.
Furthermore, it was reported that the fasting group lost more muscle mass in their arms and legs.
As one reason for this, the researchers pointed to the possibility that skipping breakfast reduced protein intake.
Muscle is like your body’s engine, so losing it can slow your metabolism and lead to a body that gains weight more easily.
This study also shows that “simply limiting your eating hours doesn’t automatically make you lose weight.”
What you eat, and how much, within those 8 hours is a major factor that determines your results.
Drawback 3: It Can Lead to Overeating at Night
Skipping breakfast shifts your eating time toward the evening, which makes it easy for dinner to turn into a feast or to keep grazing until late at night.
Night is when your body shifts into rest mode, so overeating late can burden your digestion and may also lower the quality of your sleep.
Ideally, finish dinner at least 3 hours before bed.
The Pros and Cons of the Early-Dinner (Skip-Dinner) Pattern
The early-dinner pattern, eating from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., is the opposite of skipping breakfast: it’s a way of “concentrating your meals in the first half of the day.”
To make the difference from skipping breakfast easy to see, let’s lay out its pros and cons.
Some studies suggest that the “eat dinner earlier” pattern is scientifically superior from the standpoint of the body clock (circadian rhythm).
Pros of the Early-Dinner Pattern
- ✅ It matches your body clock, so metabolic efficiency is high (metabolism is more active during the day than at night)
- ✅ You go to sleep with your stomach and intestines at rest, so your sleep quality tends to improve
- ✅ You can eat a proper breakfast, so your mind works well from the morning
- ✅ It naturally prevents late-night snacking and overeating
The biggest advantage is that it’s easy to follow your body clock, the daily rhythm built into your body.
The human body has a rhythm in which metabolism is more active during the day than at night, and at night it switches toward rest.
If you finish eating by early evening, you can go to sleep with your digestive system well rested.
Quite a few people feel they sleep more soundly when their stomach is empty before bed.
For people who find that “at night, my hand just reaches for snacks,” it may be a chance to break the habit of overeating at night.
There’s also the idea that making time to eat in the morning helps reset your body clock.
Cons of the Early-Dinner Pattern
- ⚠️ You have to finish dinner by 4 to 5 p.m., so eating out after work is difficult
- ⚠️ It may be hard to join family dinners
- ⚠️ Hunger tends to show up at night, and at first some people can’t sleep
On the other hand, the early-dinner pattern faces a big hurdle: it’s hard to reconcile with your social life.
If your dinner time falls out of step with your family’s, or you find yourself turning down more invitations to drinks or meals out, stress builds up and you won’t be able to keep going.
Also, hunger at night tends to feel harder than hunger in the morning, so some people may get so hungry before bed that they can’t sleep.
If you push yourself and end up eating in the middle of the night, it could actually throw your daily rhythm off.
The early-dinner pattern suits people whose circumstances make it easy to finish eating by early evening, such as people who work from home or live a morning-oriented lifestyle.
It’s very ideal if your circumstances fit, but keep in mind that it’s not something you should force yourself into.
Skipping Breakfast vs. Eating Dinner Early: Which Is Easier to Stick With? How to Choose
To get straight to the conclusion: for most people, the skip-breakfast pattern is the easier one to stick with.
What matters isn’t “which one is right,” but “whether it fits your lifestyle.”
Use the checklist below to decide.
| Your lifestyle | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| You often eat out or have drinks in the evening | Skip-breakfast pattern |
| You want your brain running at full speed for work or school from the morning | Early-dinner pattern |
| Your mornings are busy and hectic | Skip-breakfast pattern |
| Your family eats dinner early | Early-dinner pattern |
| You work from home, alone, at night | Either (start with skipping breakfast) |
| You want to improve your sleep quality | Early-dinner pattern |
In addition, here’s how the features of the two patterns compare.
| Point of comparison | Skip breakfast | Early dinner |
|---|---|---|
| Example eating hours | 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. | 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. |
| Fitting around family and work | Easy | Difficult |
| When you feel hungry | Morning | Early evening to bedtime |
| Compatibility with your body clock | Average | Easy to align |
| Things to watch | Overeating at lunch, lack of protein | Hunger at night, juggling social plans |
Who Skipping Breakfast Suits
- You naturally have no appetite in the morning
- You want to eat dinner with family or coworkers
- You want to make better use of your morning time
- You’re the type who finds hunger at night hard
Who Eating Dinner Early Suits
- You want to eat a proper breakfast
- You can easily finish eating by early evening, for example because you work from home
- You live a morning-oriented life, going to bed early and getting up early
- You want to sleep soundly with an empty stomach before bed
If You’re Unsure, Start with “Skipping Breakfast”
If you don’t know which to choose, I recommend starting with the skip-breakfast pattern.
That’s because it’s easy to fit into a modern lifestyle, and since there are no restrictions on evening meals, it has little impact on your social life.
Another option is to switch depending on the day of the week, such as skipping breakfast on weekdays and eating dinner early on days off.
Once you get used to it, it’s also fine to gradually move dinner earlier and shift step by step toward an eating pattern that matches your body clock.
With either schedule, as long as you secure a full 16-hour fasting period, the effects of fasting are the same.
Start by choosing the method you can keep up.
As for how long to try it, use one to two weeks as a rough guide.
Keep an eye on your physical condition, mood, and how it affects your work, and if it doesn’t suit you, there’s no problem switching to eating dinner early.
What matters is not sticking to a perfect schedule but finding a rhythm you can keep up comfortably for a long time.
If jumping straight to 16 hours is hard, it’s fine to start with 12 or 14 hours and extend it little by little.
Tips for Sticking with Skipping Breakfast for 16-Hour Fasting, and a Sample Day
Once you’ve chosen the skip-breakfast pattern, the next step is to learn some ways to keep it going smoothly.
Here, I’ll share an example of a day’s flow and tips for getting through hunger.
A Day on the Skip-Breakfast Pattern (Example)
- 7 a.m.: Wake up and drink a glass of water or plain hot water
- Morning: Get by with water, tea, or black coffee
- 12 p.m.: Lunch (eat vegetables and protein first)
- 3–4 p.m.: If you’re hungry, a light snack such as nuts or a boiled egg
- 7–8 p.m.: Finish dinner
- 11 p.m.: Go to bed (leave about 3 hours after dinner)
Tip 1: Drink Fluids Frequently During Your Fasting Period
When you feel hungry, try drinking something first.
Zero-calorie drinks such as water, tea, and black coffee are fine to have during your fasting period.
People often mistake thirst for hunger, so just drinking water can sometimes settle things down.
Tip 2: Pay Attention to the “Order” of Your First Meal
At lunch, start with dishes like salad, miso soup, and meat or fish, and save rice or bread for last.
Just changing the order you eat in makes it easier to soften sharp rises in blood sugar.
Chewing well and eating slowly is also an important way to prevent overeating.
Tip 3: Get Your Day’s Protein at Lunch and Dinner
To make up for skipping breakfast, make sure to get plenty of meat, fish, eggs, and soy products at lunch and dinner.
A good guide is to include a protein dish about the size of your palm at every meal.
Protecting your muscles is the foundation for keeping the benefits of fasting going over the long term.
Tip 4: It’s OK to Ease Up 1 or 2 Days a Week
Trying to keep it up perfectly every day can actually wear you out.
On days with social plans or when you’re not feeling well, take a break without forcing it and pick it back up the next day.
An attitude of “even if there are days I can’t do it, I can always come back to it” is the number-one tip for keeping it up long term.
Tip 5: Get Enough Sleep
It’s said that when you don’t get enough sleep, the hormones that increase appetite tend to rise, making it harder to hold out against hunger.
Staying up late also increases the temptation to snack at night, so to make your fasting period easier, build the habit of going to bed at the same time every day.
Frequently Asked Questions About Skipping Breakfast for 16-Hour Fasting
For healthy adults who get the nutrition they need from lunch and dinner, it’s not thought to be a major problem, but if you’re prone to low blood sugar or have a chronic condition, consult a doctor.
It isn’t clear which makes weight loss easier, and the amount and content of what you eat in a day are thought to affect your weight more than the time of day.
Black coffee without sugar or milk is fine, but drinking too much on an empty stomach can upset your stomach, so keep the amount moderate.
First, try drinking water or plain hot water and see how you feel; if it’s still hard, start within a comfortable range, such as shortening your fasting period to 14 hours.
Choose the 16-Hour Fasting Pattern That Fits Your Daily Rhythm
Skipping breakfast for 16-hour fasting lets you start without changing your dinner time, which makes it an easy method for many people to stick with.
On the other hand, you need to watch out for blood sugar spikes at lunch, a lack of protein, and overeating at night.
The early-dinner pattern makes it easier to follow your body clock, but it can also be hard to fit around work and family.
Each has its good points and things to watch out for, so the best choice is whichever fits your daily rhythm.
During your fasting period, stay hydrated with water or tea, and during your eating hours, focus on vegetables and protein and pay attention to the order you eat in.
Don’t aim for perfection; even if there are days you can’t do it, it’s fine as long as you come back to it the next day.
Start with a relaxed attitude: try skipping breakfast first, and if it doesn’t suit you, switch to eating dinner early.
Whichever pattern you start with, if you want to make hunger easier, it’s also worth using a supplement that supports fasting.
▼ Related Articles
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- 【A Schedule That Makes It Stick】How to Do 16:8 Fasting, Schedules for Every Lifestyle, Your 8-Hour Eating Window, and a 4-Week Starter Plan
- 【How You Eat Makes the Difference】What Should Your First Meal Be After a 16-Hour Fast? Foods and Eating Order That Prevent Blood Sugar Spikes
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