Mom was right, as scientific research is now affirming, when she told us, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” Researchers from the National Weight Control Registry, a database of more than 3000 people who have lost at least 60 pounds and kept it off for an average of six years, found that eating breakfast every day was a weight control strategy for 78% of the people in the registry.
The word breakfast simply means to break the fast our bodies have been on since we ate the night before. When you get up in the morning your blood sugar and metabolic rate are low which means there is no glucose in your body for energy. Glucose is the main source of you body’s energy and is required to fuel the muscles for physical activity throughout the day.
When you eat breakfast your metabolic rate increases and your blood glucose levels rise. The boost in your metabolism from eating breakfast signals your body to burn fat and calories giving you the energy you need for better performance. When, after not eating for 10-12 hours, you skip breakfast, your body thinks it is being starved and goes into energy conservation mode, slowing down your metabolism and storing fat. Eating a healthy, balanced breakfast will help you maintain your normal healthy body weight, give you energy for your day and insure long-term health and vitality.
When you skip a meal your metabolism slows down to conserve your energy. The reason most “diet” plans do not work is because of what I call the “Diet Metabolic Cycle.” Most diet plans have you losing a lot weight right away so you feel that they are working. When you lose weight too fast, after a few days, your body quits because it thinks it is threatened with starvation and goes into survival mode. It fights to conserve fat stores, and any measurable weight loss is mostly due to the elimination of water and muscle tissue. The result is that you have to keep eating less and less to keep losing weight. You then become discouraged, give up, and start eating like you used to. But now, because of the diet metabolic cycle, you have a slower metabolic rate and you are burning less fuel so you regain all the weight you lost, plus some!
When choosing a healthy breakfast, always include a variety of foods. A complete breakfast should have some whole grains, some lean protein and some fresh fruit. Whole grains can include wholegrain breads and breakfast cereals, wheat germ, amaranth, quinoa and oatmeal. Whole grains will provide fiber, are rich in B-vitamins and digest slowly releasing glucose slowly through the day to keep blood sugar levels steady. Lean protein can come from dairy like yogurt, low-fat/no-fat milk, cheese, eggs, lean meat, legumes, nuts, or peanut butter, and your super whole grains like quinoa and amaranth. I always try to get in two servings of fruit for breakfast for a quick energy boost. Stay away from high fat and high sugar for breakfast as that will slow you down after a couple of hours.
A traditional breakfast with eggs is a great way to get some high quality protein and may even help with weight loss. In a study presented at the 2007 Experimental Biology meeting, researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center compared weight loss of women who ate either two eggs or a bagel for breakfast. The two breakfast meals were identical in calories and volume. “Compared to the bagel eaters, overweight women who ate two eggs for breakfast five times a week for eight weeks as part of a low-fat, reduced-calorie diet, lost 65% more weight, reduced waist circumference by 83%, reported higher energy levels, and had no significant differences in their blood cholesterol or triglyceride levels,” reports researcher Nikhil V. Durhanhar, PHD.
You do not need to get on a diet program, purchase special foods or dietary supplements, or use diet pills to succeed at weight loss. In fact, the only intelligent thing to do is to start eating healthy every day starting with breakfast!
Now that you know mom was right, start eating a healthy breakfast every day in her honor!
