Is breakfast the most important meal of the day?

I frequently come across the claim that it is very important to eat a breakfast since skipping breakfast is associated with a high prevalence of obesity and being overweight.

I confess, I never eat breakfasts and have scarcely done so my entire life. I simply do not feel hungry immediately after getting up. It takes about 3 or 4 hours after getting up before I start to feel hungry.

It seems peculiar to me that for those similar to me and are averse to eating food in the morning, that they will actually lose weight or stay slim by forcing themselves to eat food, which is quite the opposite to what one might expect. Further, doesn't the body generally tend to regulate its own weight by eliciting hunger pangs when you need food? 

But what about this research? Well, at most it establishes that those who are overweight have a greater propensity to skip breakfasts. Similar to seemingly most epidemiological research claiming this, that and the other, it fails to establish a causal relationship. When ice cream sales go up so do cases of sunburn. But no-one would dream of saying that eating ice cream causes sunburn. And most people die in bed, but no-one would dream of claiming that beds are therefore dangerous.

So before concluding that one thing causes another, we need at least some possible plausible causal mechanism, and then we need to show that it is this causal mechanism that is behind the correlated pattern that we see. In addition, for the specific case of whether eating breakfasts is always wise, there needs to be a study on those who are overweight and averse to eating breakfasts, to start eating breakfasts and to see whether these people end up losing weight.

Lacking such a plausible causal mechanism, there will always be other possible explanations for such patterns. In the specific case of slimmer people regularly eating breakfasts, very possibly there is a link between eating breakfast and people adhering to societal norms and being concerned about their well-being and health. These people will have a propensity as a whole to avoid extreme, or what is generally considered to be unwise behaviour e.g. they don't eat loads of junk food, they tend to eat lots of fruit and vegetables, and they tend to eat regular meals, including breakfasts. This then might explain why they aren't fat. In other words it has nothing to do with eating breakfast per se. Rather it is because they avoid junk food and indulge less in the risky behaviour that might have a deleterious effect on their health.