You’ve heard the advice on breakfast. It is not too complicated. It goes like this: don’t skip breakfast! But for heaven’s sake, that doesn’t give you carte blanche to order the Hungry Man Mega-Breakfast at your local greasy spoon.
Breakfast is an easy victory. It gives you the energy you need to move into your day. And it is often at your home so you have complete control over what happens – as opposed to choosing off a limited menu at a restaurant. Do it right and you just set the tone for the rest of the day.
Eating a healthy breakfast is like running the opening kick-off back 70 yards to your opponent’s 30-yard line. A great start and everything is a little easier after that.
A Harvard Medical School study showed that people who eat breakfast everyday are a third less likely to become obese. Eating first thing in the morning, may help stabilize blood sugar levels, which regulates appetite and energy.
According to the director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado, one common trait of people who are successful at managing their weight is eating breakfast seven-days-a-week. He says, “Eating a meal first thing in the day seems to help people manage hunger better. The typical pattern of obese people is to skip breakfast, have a light lunch, and eat a lot from late afternoon on.” Does that sound like you?
You get up having slept as late as you can. In fact, you hit snooze a couple times. Now you are in a rush to drop the kids off, get to work, whatever. You skip breakfast. Grab a mug of designer coffee on your way somewhere. You refill it at work.
You are then starving at lunch so you order that big thing with all the bacon on it and supersize some fries. After you awake from your food coma, you need a snack in the afternoon and rummage around your desk. Not finding anything you hit the vending machine and get a candy bar and a soda (or let’s say you eat a light lunch, and then mid-afternoon comes and the fistfulls of junk start). Dinner is your more formal meal so you eat until you are past full and then hit some late night snacks before going off to bed to repeat the next day.
The trick in avoiding the above is to plan for it. Give yourself some time for a nutritious breakfast. What to have? We’ll cover that in our next post. If you can’t wait until then, we’ll now give you a super fast executive summary in four words: fruit, whole grain cereal. — Jim Ballard
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June 22, 2008 at 10:03 pm |
I agree, if you are on diet, skipping your meals will not help because it will only make you eat more the next meal. When you are hungry, it will make you want to eat just anything that may put your diet plan even worst. Taking regular multiple smaller meals are more advisable.