Why Breakfast Is The Key to a Healthy Lifestyle

As a personal trainer I have probably met as many people who eat breakfast as those who don’t.

Looking at the issue from a logical point of view, by the time we wake up most of us should have had a healthy 7 to 8 hours of sleep, so that’s 7-9 hours of not eating, consuming or refuelling. Don’t panic, your body was in standby mode and therefore was burning much less energy however now you have got up and started burning fuel again.

In order to function normally, eating breakfast is what’s needed to kick start your metabolism and getting all your systems running healthy, without it your body is going to stay in starvation mode! That’s burning as little calories as possible to survive, your body after all is designed to survive, it’s amazing at adapting and will do this very well. However, I’m sure if you are looking to lose weight you are going to want your body to burn more calories, use fat and reduce weight. Well, the truth is, if you don’t eat breakfast it’s going be very hard to achieve that.

Take this example, of how you drive your car. If your car is low on fuel and a fuel station is not that close you are going to start driving your car really conservatively to conserve fuel, so no hard accelerating low speeds and all to save fuel. That’s exactly what your body is doing before it get’s breakfast, the sooner we refuel, the sooner we can start driving normally. 

Why you SHOULD be eating Breakfast

Now what should we eat

To be honest it doesn’t really matter, obviously a massive fry up or a bacon sandwich every morning is a concern so be sensible. The point is at this time of day nearly everything you eat will be turned into energy, your breakfast can be large, with a large selection of breakfast foods from toast to fruit, yoghurt and cereal. Why not mix and match! Take your time over breakfast, enjoy and restart your fuel system and fire up your metabolism for the day.

Why don’t we?

I believe the biggest reason we don’t eat as we should in the morning is time, we just don’t have much time or we don’t plan well enough. If you have to get up earlier, do it and that’s even better as you will burn more calories.

We don’t have much time for breakfast with our busy lives but we do have to MAKE time.