YES, YOU CAN SKIP BREAKFAST — WITHOUT FEELING GUILTY

BY ALL means have breakfast if you have time for it, or a busy day ahead, but if you are keen to try my one-meal or two-meal plan, it’s probably the easiest to skip.

The beauty of my plans is their flexibility. You decide how many meals you need on any given day to fit your life.

If I’m working from home, I can make infinite cups of coffee to stave off peckishness, so I can happily sail through until dinner without eating. But if I have a busy day out and about, I might kick off with a bit of breakfast for an energy boost.

It’s a personal choice. But whatever you decide, don’t let yourself be brow-beaten into believing there’s something fundamentally wrong with skipping breakfast.

I’m a fan of Terence Kealey, professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham, who has published a book that scientifically explores the idea of breakfast as the most important meal.

He says most of the epidemiology of breakfast is flawed and debunks the ‘myths’ that cereals are healthy, that eating breakfast is good for the brain and that it’s slimming (studies show a good breakfast will reduce the amount you eat for lunch by 44 calories, but a ‘good breakfast’ can be as many as 600 calories).

Professor Kealey believes we should all skip breakfast — in fact, he says the only people who can tolerate the meal (as long as it is low in carbohydrates and sugar) are the ‘slim, fit and young’, and even then ideally it would be a boiled egg or half a mozzarella ball. The rest of us, he says, should fast until lunchtime.

On the days when I do factor breakfast into my diet plan, my favourite choice is bacon and eggs. It feels like a treat and it’s far healthier than you’d think (provided you don’t add toast or other extras).

The recipe is simple — fry two or three rashers of the best bacon you can afford in a dry pan, until it’s crunchy in some places and sticky in others, then push to the side. Crack two eggs into the bacon fat and cook until done.

Porridge is an easy and inexpensive alternative, packed full of fibre. Use steelcut oats if you can — they’re chopped up, not rolled flat like usual, so take longer to cook, but they are really delicious. Soak them overnight and they’ll cook faster.

You can soup up your porridge by adding a mashed banana and a pinch of cinnamon while cooking, or a handful of berries and a spoonful of yoghurt at the end.

For a truly sophisticated version, stir in a couple of teaspoons of cocoa powder and some finely grated orange zest — it’ll taste like the Gold Coast of Australia, rather than a rainy day in Glasgow.