Boosting Your Breakfast-It's Your Most Important Meal

If your typical breakfast consists of three cups of coffee and a doughnut snatched from the break room, you need to read this.  You wouldn’t try to run your car all over town on an empty gas tank, yet most adult Americans attempt the metabolic equivalent when they skip or skimp on breakfast.

People underestimate the importance of breakfast because they don’t understand how their brain and central nervous system are fueled.  Glucose is the fuel you need to think, walk, hold the cell phone, talk, and do almost anything.  A well-balanced meal provides your brain with glucose for up to five hours.  If you sleep more than five hours at night, you wake up in a glucose-deprived state.

When you wait until lunchtime to eat, you compound the problem.   Now you've gone thirteen or fourteen hours with nothing to refuel your system. Your brain is deprived of fuel and your blood sugar levels are low.  The effects:

• You feel irritable, cranky, or crabby
• It’s hard to think straight
• You can’t seem to solve problems
• Remembering things is harder than usual
• You can’t concentrate

These things occur because when your brain and central nervous system have been deprived of glucose for too long, your body has to work overtime to break down stored carbohydrates or turn fat or protein into a form that your brain can use to function.

School and the workplace are very competitive environments.  If you don’t eat breakfast, and thus, your blood sugar is low, your classmates and co-workers who are better fueled will have an advantage.

There’s another advantage to breakfast.  According to a study conducted by the Maryland Medical Research Institute, girls who ate breakfast had a lower body fat percentage than girls who did not.

Eating a good breakfast turbo charges your brain, sets the stage for a good mood, and can help you shed extra pounds.  So why do most Americans skip it?  Because it takes time.  Mornings tend to be a flurry of busy activity, driven by school or work start times.  People get in a hurry, so they bypass breakfast.

Gerry Morton, CEO of EnergyFirst, has these suggestions for quick, easy breakfasts that you can fix in less than a minute.  Pick one of these:

• 4-6 oz. plain, organic yogurt, topped with a scoop of EnergyFirst ProEnergy Vanilla Whey Protein isolate, 2 oz. blackberries, blueberries or strawberries (fresh or frozen), and one tablespoon of EnergyFirst Omega Mix Blend.  You can add Greenergy to the shake or drink it separately. 
  
  
• One whole egg and 3 egg whites, plus a tablespoon of salsa and one ounce of Monterrey Jack cheese, scrambled, served with one piece of whole wheat bread.
  
  
• 1 ½ cups pure water or almond milk, one scoop of EnergyFirst ProEnergy Chocolate Whey Protein isolate, one tablespoon of EnergyFirst Omega Mix Blend, ½ to 1 cup of any kind of berries (fresh or frozen), and one scoop of EnergyFirst Greenergy.

But what do you do if you don’t even have a minute to fix one of the delicious breakfasts listed above…let’s say you overslept and your carpool’s in the driveway, honking the horn?

Athletes at The University of Texas at Austin are urged to plan their meals based on what they’ll be doing in the next 3-5 hours.  Most people don’t do much after dinner, so they don’t need copious calories at that meal.  Mornings are the most active time of the day, so breakfast is a key fueling time.

How many calories should you consume at breakfast, and of what type?  It varies depending on your lean body mass, your metabolic rate, and what you’re going to do that morning (working at a computer requires far less calories than running intervals on a track for 2 hours,) but a good rule of thumb is to consume 300 to 500 calories at breakfast.

Fat can compose 20% or less of your breakfast, and protein can be 40-45%, with the rest coming from complex carbohydrates.  Make sure that your fats are the good ones and they are not saturated, hydrogenated, or trans-fats.  Ensure that your protein source has less than 20% fat by calories.

Gerry Morton, CEO of EnergyFirst, holds an MS in Nutrition and is an experienced athlete who has competed in 30+ marathons and 4 Ironman triathlons. Gerry is an excellent source of information on nutrition, supplementation and exercise. Since 1997, he has been educating and motivating others on how to attain peak performance. For more information, please visit www.energyfirst.com or email Gerry here.