Can You Eat Bread and Lose Weight?

We recently dropped the Illegal Burger and it’s DELICIOUS, but we already know what your super-duper nutrition friend is going to say…

“Don’t’ you know that you can’t eat bread and lose weight!?”

Luckily, there is a study published in the Clinical Nutrition Journal [1] that looked at exactly this question BREAD vs. NO BREAD.

Both groups were put on diets with the same amounts of calories and macros. The only difference was that the BREAD diet - you guessed it - included bread.

At the end of the study, the NO BREAD group lost 9 pounds, 2.1% body fat, and about 2 inches off their waist and the BREAD group lost 9.5 pounds, 2.5% body fat, and about 2 inches off their waist.

And wait for it…there was no statistically significant difference in any body composition value between the BREAD and NO BREAD group after the diet.

When you understand how body fat is actually lost which we have covered HERE you probably aren’t super surprised by these findings.

So can you eat bread and lose body fat?

Yes! Yes, you can.

Finally, the wildest findings of this study is that the NO BREAD group had over THREE times as many dropouts as the BREAD group!

Now, if you have been following along with our Fit Tips you know that the real SECRET to long-term fat loss is ADHERENCE so if planning for and eating some bread makes your diet more sustainable, it is probably best to keep it in.

Here’s to an Illegal Burger which for the vast majority of us can absolutely be legal!

#GIVEAFIT

*As a brief aside, in this post we have gone through one study looking specifically as BREAD vs. NO BREAD, but we have massive amounts of other evidence that people can eat bread and lose weight. For example, the vast majority of large multi-center weight loss studies like Look Ahead [2, 3] with over 5,000 participants are not eliminating entire food items like bread and as we have covered extensively before you can absolutely eat carbohydrates and still lose body fat.

REFERENCES:

1. Loria-Kohen, V., et al., Evaluation of the usefulness of a low-calorie diet with or without bread in the treatment of overweight/obesity. Clin Nutr, 2012. 31(4): p. 455-61.

2. Look, A.R.G., Eight-year weight losses with an intensive lifestyle intervention: the look AHEAD study. Obesity (Silver Spring), 2014. 22(1): p. 5-13.

3. Wadden, T.A., et al., Four-year weight losses in the Look AHEAD study: factors associated with long-term success. Obesity (Silver Spring), 2011. 19(10): p. 1987-98.