As we begin a new year, it is to be expected that dietary changes would be the hot topic of conversation. Diets to lose weight, gain muscle or reduce disease all come with a unique set of rules. Depending on your goals, you could be eating totally different foods, or intermittent fasting and eating none at all. But the success of a daily diet plan largely depends on what you eat in your most important meal. So should I be fasting or is breakfast actually the most important meal of the day?
Breakfast Doesn’t Have to Be In the Morning
Breaking your overnight fast could be at 8am or at 2pm. It really doesn’t matter. We use the term “breakfast” to talk about a morning meal, but really it is just the first meal of the day. These terms are very important to differentiate because we often associate “breakfast” with foods like eggs and toast, cereal, smoothies, coffee and tea. The “first meal of the day” could be whatever you like. I prefer to use this term, because as you can see, our common “breakfast” foods don’t always have high nutritional value.
Breakfast Is Actually the Most Important Meal of the Day
The human body has adapted to hunter-gatherer times when food was scarce and accumulation of body fat was meant to help you survive a famine. When your body is at the end of an overnight fast, your appetite hormones are waiting for cues from your diet to determine how to behave. If you continue to fast, your body will respond accordingly. If you break your fast, your body will respond with appetite hormones and digestive enzymes. How your body responds depends largely on what you’re eating for that first meal and sets the stage for what you crave for the rest of the day. Therefore, to sustain a healthy diet, breakfast really IS the most important meal of the day.
What You Eat is More Important Than When You Eat
After breaking a fast, what matters most to your body is what you eat. If you break your fast with the typical high sugar breakfast foods (ie. cereal, toast, biscuits), your blood sugar will spike. Insulin levels rise to meet the demand and bring that sugar into the tissues. If that sugar can be used right away (ie. exercise), great! If not, that sugar is getting stored for later as fat tissue. Either way, sugar levels decline and within an hour, you will start to feel sluggish, drowsy or hungry.
If you break a fast with a balance of protein, fibre and healthy fats, your blood sugar will be stable and you are unlikely to experience crashes throughout the day. It doesn’t matter if this happens at 8am or if you are intermittent fasting until 2pm. The body’s response is the same. But it is very difficult to continue on a healthy eating plan when you began with a high sugar meal and are craving sugar for the rest of the day.
Breakfast is Bigger Than Just Food
What you eat for breakfast is crucial to managing cravings and dietary choices for the rest of the day. This is because of how food interacts with 2 major hormones: grehlin (the famous appetite hormone) and leptin (the famous appetite suppressor hormone). High carb and sugar diets confuse grehlin and dysregulate leptin, leading to increased appetite and inevitable weight gain.
But dietary choices are about so much more than appetite and weight. What you eat at that first meal and every subsequent meal determines your mood, energy, focus and resilience to stress for the rest of the day. The bacteria in your gut play a large role in immune health and chronic disease. They have to deal with the introduction of ‘bad’ bacteria from processed and harmful foods, while striving to maintain balance. Read here: Why Inflammation Begins In The Gut
That daily “energy crash” between 2-4pm is common, not normal. If this is something you have noticed on a regular basis, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate your diet and your digestive health. Small changes with the first meal of the day can make big differences in how you feel for the rest of the day. This is why breakfast really is the most important meal of the day.