Good Morning, Morning!

A quick Google search tells you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But I guess you didn’t need Google to affirm that, since you probably heard it multiple times from pretty much everything and everyone, like your cereal boxes, television commercials, or your mom. So the next logical question is, “why?” Personally, I think it’s critical to understand the ‘why’ before I make any type of behavioral change…and as I’m probably not the only one who learns this way, I thought I’d share this ‘why’ with you.

First factoid regarding breakfast—the word comes from someone breaking his or her overnight fast (not eating)…very interesting!

Anyways, skipping breakfast may not be beneficial for you as it can interfere with daily metabolism! Let me explain. While we’re sleeping, our body is in a “fasting state”. Ergo, if we decide to not eat breakfast, the fasting state is prolonged, which can cause our body to think it’s starving and hold onto more fat for the rest of the day. In other words we need breakfast to kick-start our metabolism!

This may be similar to someone undergoing a highly restrictive diet. Unfortunately, the reason why they don’t actually lose weight is because their body thinks it’s starving. Once they stop the diet and eat normally, the body will store everything they consume as fat in order to restore the body’s natural setpoint weight.

Try to eat breakfast within 1½ - 2 hours after waking—but don’t wait any longer! And to all those breakfast haters out there, you don’t actually have to eat ‘breakfast food.’ You can eat left over pizza or even a sandwich! But you might have to wake up a little bit earlier to prepare your most important meal of the day!

Last tidbit regarding breakfast: try incorporating three food groups into this meal (well any meal really). For example: cereal with milk and a banana, or toast with peanut butter and a glass of juice are awesome options.

Now you can finally bid your morning, “good morning!”

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Image courtesy of DariaShevtsova