Breakfast As A Tool In Your Fitness Plan By Sam Bakhtiar At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Ah, breakfast. The most important meal of the day. A time to relax, greet the morning and slowly wake up to face the day. What, that doesn’t sound like your mornings? Maybe you’re dragging yourself out of bed at quarter after mumble, stumbling through a cold shower and out the door in 20 minutes flat? Got kids? Well, you have to make sure they’re all up, dressed, fed, packed, and on the bus and then you have your own schedule to worry about. Who has time for breakfast? Actually, if you know what’s good for you, you do. Big or small, leisurely or stuck between your knees to grab bites of at stop lights on your way to work, breakfast really is everything it’s cracked up to be.

After six to eight (ok, maybe more like four but that’s another article) of sleep and who knows how long before that since last night’s dinner, your body is running on empty when you wake up in the morning. You may not be feeling it yet, but that is because our bodies are actually precisely tuned machines, designed to let you get your day started and have time to find some food before they start complaining about hunger. That said, your body does not like to function on no fuel, in fact if you push yourself too hard before lunch without any food in the morning, you can send yourself into starvation mode and actually end up burning fewer calories over the course of the day no matter how much you are running around or working out.

The body is very good at holding on to its energy and rationing it out if necessary. Remember, humans did not always have this ready access to all the food we could want to eat. We as a species are designed to endure long periods of hunger and remain functional. Unfortunately, while all of this is well and good if you are living in the African bush gathering nuts and hunting game for your survival, it can lead to weight problems for those of us who can just hop in the car and drive to the grocery store on a whim. To combat excess weight gain, make sure to let your body know that it has to keep processing your food and using up that stored energy by keeping that food coming in the morning.

When you eat, your body processes the nutrients and calories down into a substance called glucose, which is where it stores the energy your cells will later use. Every system in your body runs on glucose, from your thinking brain to your speaking tongue to your typing fingers to your walking legs. When your body runs out of glucose to turn into energy, it starts to make due with whatever is at hand. Fat is the first to go, but eventually it is followed by muscle if you go too long without eating. Not only is all of this stressful on your body, it also impairs your mental and physical function and decreases your metabolism. That’s right- if your body thinks it is starving because you skipped breakfast, you can actually lose less weight. In fact, studies have shown that people who skip breakfast, even if they are trying to cut calories, actually tend to gain more weight as they get hungry later in the day and between a slowed metabolism and binge eating as a result of that hunger, pack on the pounds.

When choosing a breakfast food, try to find something with a nice slow burning carbohydrate like oats or other whole grains, or the protein packed goodness of an egg. Really, anything but candy will do nicely, but as always healthy is better.

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