The majority of Americans identify breakfast as the most important meal of the day.
Eating a hearty breakfast is considered a cornerstone of a healthy diet.
Skipping it, we are told it will make us ravenously hungry and prone to overeat the rest of the day.
Although we think it’s a universal truth, it’s only a North American custom.
The question we don’t even ask ourselves is, are we actually hungry?
I share with women all the time that the first thing you need to do when you wake up is to refresh your body with a glass of water.
Thirst can easily be mistaken for hunger.
Then check in with your body to see if you are truly hungry.
One thing that my clients and I work on is tuning into our physical body, and it’s hunger signals.
That is your body’s way of communicating when it needs more fuel to energize it.
We have trained ourselves to eat just because it’s time to eat or because we believe we “should” eat.
But guess what?
If you don’t feel hungry first thing in the morning, it’s not because your metabolism is slow.
Your body is doing what it’s been designed to do.
It’s called the dawn phenomenon.
There are natural cortisol and adrenalin released that stimulate a flight-or-fight response, thus activating the sympathetic nervous system.
This gears up our bodies for action. Our hormones then release glucose into the blood for quick energy that comes from our liver stores.
So you get fueled up from the fuel that is already in your body, more specifically glucose from your liver.
The word breakfast literally means the meal that breaks our fast, which is the period when we are sleeping and, therefore, not eating.
If we eat our first meal at 12 noon, then grilled salmon salad will be our “break-fast” meal- and there’s nothing wrong with that.
A large breakfast is thought to reduce the food intake throughout the rest of the day.
However, such does not always seem to be the case. Studies show that lunch and dinner portions tend to stay constant, regardless of how much was eaten at breakfast.
I’ll be the first one to admit that before my own personal self-coaching work and transformation, I would eat breakfast right away because I believed that it was a healthy choice to do so.
I see the same with the women that I coach.
They are shocked when they tune in to their physical body for hunger signals, how long it actually takes for them to feel hungry at first.
As counterintuitive as it sounds and is, many of us force ourselves to eat more in an effort to lose weight.
We have bought into breakfast speeding up our metabolism and being very healthy even though often times we don’t even know if we are hungry.
The other part is that we are always in a rush during morning times.
Therefore we want convenience.
So it’s very typical to grab a protein bar, a bagel, sugary yogurt, or instant oatmeal.
By contrast, very few people are eating eggs for breakfast regularly.
It’s my hope you give you room for pause and see where you land with this.
When you travel to Europe both France and Poland, they don’t eat right away.
In France, breakfast is usually around 9 am where their last meal the night before ended at 8 pm.
The French call their breakfast petit dejeuner (little lunch).
It’s a very small meal consisting of natural yogurt and fresh fruit and a small piece of baguette/with butter if they eat.
This allows for the body to have at least a 12-hour rest overnight.
Anytime we eat something healthy or not, and we are not hungry, our body does what it’s supposed to do.
It stores the food to be used later in our fat cells.
Real-world application:
- Are you hungry at breakfast? If not, listen to your body and don’t eat.
- Does breakfast make you hungry an hour or two later? Then you need to evaluate your options.
- If you are hungry after drinking a glass of water and want to eat breakfast, then do so.
- Skipping breakfast because you are not hungry does not give you the freedom to eat a Krispy Kreme donut as a mid-morning snack.
If you have any questions around this or want to chat more, I am here and would love to help.
Nothing gives me more pleasure than to help women gain freedom while losing their extra weight for good.
You deserve to live a lifestyle that’s balanced in taking care of your mind and body without all the food drama.
