Breakfast, to eat or not to eat!

If you are one of those dieters who loves food and uses the excuse “breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ when someone walks in on you chowing down at 8:00am, I think you need to stop reading now.

Yes, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. However, it is not because you have to eat in the morning. The word breakfast is not synonymous with ‘morning meal’. The word ‘breakfast’ simply means, to ‘break your fast’. This assumes that your body has been in a fasted state of about 14-16 hours.

Breakfast, which means breaking-fast, signifies ‘the first meal of your day’. Breakfast is very important, because the kind or category of food you eat first on an empty stomach sets the tone of the day. Whether you will burn fat to lose weight or, store sugars to grow fat and gain weight, is affected by what you eat for breakfast and also when you eat breakfast.

Now, this may sound confusing, but it’s simple to understand. If you finish eating dinner (that includes carbs or sugars) around 9:00pm and you don’t eat or drink anything else, you sleep and wake up at 7:00am. Do not eat! If you eat a non-protein meal anytime before 1:00pm, you most likely would be prone to weight gain. The logic among scientists is that it takes about 14-18 hours for the body to use all carbohydrates and sugars in the body as energy, before reaching the fat that needs to be used as energy for weight-loss to begin.

This idea of delaying breakfast is not new among fitness enthusiasts, athletes and body-builders. Many of them follow diet plans such as, Intermittent Fasting and Paleo, which adopt some sort of fasting. So, if exercise is not really your thing, or you just can’t seem to lose the weight even with dieting, try skipping your traditional breakfast so your body can begin burning fat.