Burning fat by correct eating starts with one plain rule from the NHS. Its healthy-eating tips say that if you eat or drink more than your body needs, "the energy you do not use is stored as fat", and if you eat and drink too little, you lose weight. The same page puts the practical version in one line: "aim to eat less and be more active."
The earlier version of this page took a narrower route. It was about sugar cravings, and it made three suggestions: eat protein at breakfast, do not go hungry, and watch for hidden sugar. Each of those can be checked. Some of the checking backs the advice up, and some of it shows the advice was stated more strongly than the research allows.
What the protein-breakfast studies actually measured
The old text mentioned brain scans and a hormone called PYY. That matches a 2013 trial from the University of Missouri, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (PubMed 23446906). Twenty overweight or obese girls, aged about 19, who normally skipped breakfast, tried three patterns for six days each: a 350-kcal cereal breakfast with 13 g of protein, a 350-kcal egg-and-beef breakfast with 35 g of protein, or no breakfast at all.
Here is what came out. Both breakfasts cut daily hunger compared with skipping. Only the high-protein one lowered ghrelin and raised peptide YY. Before dinner, the girls looked at food pictures inside a functional MRI scanner, and both breakfasts reduced activity in the amygdala, hippocampus and midfrontal areas compared with skipping, with the high-protein meal reducing hippocampal activity further. The high-protein breakfast also cut evening snacking on high-fat foods.
Then the catch, in the authors' own words: there were "no differences in daily energy intake." The girls did not eat fewer calories across the day. For anyone reading this page to burn fat, that matters more than the scan results.
A follow-up pilot from the same group (Nutrition Journal 2014, PubMed 25098557) used the same 20 girls and the same meals, and asked directly about cravings. Both breakfasts reduced post-meal cravings for sweet and savoury foods compared with skipping. The high-protein breakfast only "tended" to cut savoury cravings more, with p = 0.08, short of the p < 0.05 the paper reports for its other results. So the honest reading is not "protein stops sugar cravings". In this small group, breakfast itself, at either protein level, is what cut cravings for sweet food.
Do not go hungry in the morning
The NHS lands in the same place from a different direction. Tip eight on its list is "Do not skip breakfast". It notes that some people skip it because they think it will help them lose weight, and says a healthy breakfast high in fibre and low in fat, sugar and salt "can form part of a balanced diet". Its own example is a wholegrain lower-sugar cereal with semi-skimmed milk and sliced fruit on top.
The old page also told readers to eat five meals a day and to eat breakfast at 10 am if they could not face food early. Neither of those has a source here, so they are gone.
Hidden sugar in savoury food
This part of the old advice holds up. The NHS page on cutting down on sugar says many foods "we do not consider to be sweet contain a surprisingly large amount of sugar", and names ready-made soups, stir-in sauces and ready meals. It says ketchup can have as much as 23 g of sugar in 100 g. Those sauces are usually served in small amounts, it adds, but the sugar "can add up if eaten every day". Salad dressings like salad cream are on its list too.
To check a label, the same page gives two cut-offs: 22.5 g or more of total sugar per 100 g is high, and 5 g or less is low.
Where dates fit when you are cutting back
Dates are high in sugar, and the NHS says so by name: "Dried fruit, such as raisins, dates and apricots, is high in sugar". USDA FoodData Central puts Deglet Noor dates (record 171726) at 282 kcal and 63.4 g of sugars per 100 g, well past the 22.5 g line. A 30 g portion, which is the NHS dried-fruit portion size, works out at about 85 kcal and 19 g of sugars.
The NHS advice is to keep dried fruit to mealtimes, "as part of a dessert, for example", rather than as a snack, because it sticks to teeth. A second NHS page, on sugar in the diet, suggests adding fruit to an unsweetened cereal for sweetness, and lists dried fruit as one option. That puts a few chopped dates on a plain breakfast cereal, which also covers the do-not-skip-breakfast tip above.
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