TARGETED WEIGHT MANAGEMENT: Healthy Breakfast : part one

BREAKFAST

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Breakfast eaters generally take in more nutrients, less fat and more fiber than breakfast skippers, which means they also tend to be healthier and more energized.

In fact, breakfast is so important that leading health researchers

have named eating it as one of the “Seven Habits for Longevity”. Eating breakfast is right up there with not smoking and exercising regularly in helping you live a long healthy life.

However, it is in the field of weight loss that breakfast truly shines. Breakfast eaters are 4-5 times less likely to be overweight than skippers, and weigh an average of 3.6 kg’s less overall. There are many reasons why this happens; breakfast reverses the metabolic slowdown that occurs while we sleep. Reversing this decline alone can increase your potential weight loss by just over 1 kg in a year.

Many traditional breakfast foods also have weight-loss fighting powers of their own, while the simple act of eating first thing also triggers the body to produce optimum levels of the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin (as mentioned in our newsletter Part 4), high levels of which were found to be a major contributing factor of weight-loss success.

It has also been discovered that calories eaten first thing actually seem to be more filling than the same number of calories eaten later in the day, which means that breakfast eaters actually consume less calories overall than those who think they are saving calories by skipping it.

But to get these positive effects you need to eat the right kind of breakfast. Many of the foods we eat first thing (including white toast, sugary cereals and instant porridge) are high GI foods that convert very rapidly to sugar in the body. This causes blood sugar levels to surge, then crash, and this crash triggers hunger pangs. Get your combinations right by filling your breakfasts with low glycaemic carbohydrates or through including a little protein which slows digestion, and you will avoid this sugar seesaw and the extra calories you consume because of it.