Breakfast - Most Important Meal Of The Day

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Breakfast - Most Important Meal Of The Day
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=S._Wagner]S. Wagner

I’m sure you’ve heard it said that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The truth is, it is and there is a very good reason for it.

If you’re like the average human being, the last meal you’ve eaten was sometime around 5 or 6 PM the day before. Maybe you had a snack at around 8 or 9 PM. Even with that snack, it’s probably been a good 10 hours since you’ve last eaten. Your body needs food just to survive let alone to run at peak efficiency. By skipping breakfast and waiting until lunch, which for most people isn’t until noon, you’re effectively not eating for 15 hours or more. Talk about fasting.

The problem with skipping breakfast is twofold. For starters, your energy level is going to be very low because you are forcing yourself to run on empty. As time goes on from the last meal you will begin to feel lightheaded and even nauseous. If you’re working at a job, your morning hours are going to feel like days. Just making it through to lunch is a chore and almost impossible. People who skip breakfast have been known to pass out at work, especially if they have a job that requires manual labor.

Studies have shown that people who eat breakfast in the morning perform better at school and at work than people who skip breakfast. In addition to that, studies also show that for breakfast to be most effective it should be eaten with 2 hours of waking up. Gives you an idea of just how low on fuel we really are when we start our day. To understand why this is so we need to understand what happens at night when we go to sleep.

Overnight, which is essentially a fast, our body uses up its glycogen stores (i.e. its carbohydrate stores) found in muscles and the liver. "Breaking the fast" ensures that our bodies replenish glycogen stores and the added fuel acts to jump-start the body's metabolism. In fact, any time we fast our body goes into starvation mode-the body's defense mechanism by which it decreases the amount of fuel it burns in order to conserve energy. This inherent reaction leaves the body tired and less able to perform. On the flip side, eating something within 2 hours of waking jump-starts our metabolism, and eating frequently throughout the day provides our bodies with the fuel they need to burn energy efficiently.

Studies also show that people who eat breakfast in the morning have improved memory and cognitive functions. Think about how hard it was for you to concentrate on what you were doing if you skipped your first meal of the day. By doing this on a long term basis you are subjecting your mind to great stress because it has to work harder to function.

Eating breakfast in the morning also helps prevent another problem, obesity. This may sound strange since it seems like if you eat more you’ll gain more weight. This isn’t a matter of eating more. It is a matter of eating regularly. By skipping breakfast, you’re subjecting yourself to increased risk of eating binges. Eventually you will get so hungry from not eating that either you won’t make it to lunch and start hitting the vending machines at work, which are loaded with fattening snacks, or you’ll eat more at lunch than you would normally eat. By eating more at one meal you are forcing your body to work harder to digest your food. Plus much of that “extra” food we eat, which is usually found in vending machines, will turn into fat. Over a long period of time this bingeing becomes habit, forcing us to eat more. The more we eat, the large our stomachs get, which makes us want to eat even more. This analysis is rather simplified but this is basically what happens and the reason people become obese. They simply eat too much and eat the wrong things.

So, please make sure that you get yourself a good breakfast. It may just mean the difference between having a good day and one that you're barely able to get through.

Steve Wagner never misses breakfast in the morning. Come visit his site where you'll get loads of tips on nutrition and preventing illness through natural means. Also, pick up your free report on how the drug companies are killing us and get your 52 week series on various natural treatments for a variety of common ailments. Visit us at http://www.natures-healing-remedies.com/

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