Breakfast has always been the subject of great debate: Is it really the most important meal of the day? Should you really be stuffing yourself when you don’t feel like eating at 6 am if you need to leave for work that early? Is it just a marketing ploy by companies to push cereal?
A statement by the American Heart Association earlier this year put breakfast back in the news, when it said irrevocably that it is a bad idea to skip the meal. Look at it this way: this is the first meal your body will have after more than eight hours. At night, when you sleep, your body rests, but the brain doesn’t. It continues to use energy (glucose) from body stores. So when you wake up, the body needs to recover from a state of ‘fasting’. If you don’t supply it with energy, both body and brain will function sluggishly. Breakfast helps to replenish blood glucose levels, important since the brain itself has no reserves of glucose, its main energy source, and constantly must be replenished.
Also, by starving our body, we force it to store energy (fat) for the next time such an emergency takes place. Imagine this happens every day, and your body will simply keep holding on to the fat. Studies show that what you eat at this meal influences what you put in your mouth the rest of the day. Breakfast skippers tend to feel irritable and tired quickly. And if weight is your concern area, your morning meal will simply help in kick-starting your metabolism early in the day.
It’s not important to dwell on which meal is the most important, but to treat your morning meal as fuel for the day. So even if you can’t eat a hearty meal first thing in the morning, you can make a bowl of something nutritious and split it into two rounds: one in the morning and one mid-morning. Some people like to take a short walk and feel more ready for breakfast. And a maida biscuit with sweet tea or a cup of black coffee with a slice of toast and butter isn’t breakfast. Include complex carbohydrates, protein and a small amount of fat.
Kavita Devgan is a nutritionist based in Delhi and is the author of Don’t Diet! 50 Habits of Thin People