It’s the fad nowadays to skip breakfast and “fast” for 16-18 hours overnight. I have a lot of issues with this for a couple different reasons. Let's get into that today!
Circadian Rhythm Support- you are meant to provide yourself energy (food) in the morning. Ideally we are up with the “sun”/exposed to sunlight, given food, provided movement, given hydration, and then we sleep 7-9 hours. Our body naturally wants to function in this way. If you are not feeding your body until 1-2pm in the afternoon, then you are not providing your body the energy it needs to function properly. Also, what I find is a lot of people that intermittently fast eat all their calories in the evening right before bed. This is ideally when our body is not needing “energy” and actually can be disruptive to your sleep. It is counterproductive to keeping your biological clock on point.
Women Supported Studies- A majority of the studies done on intermittent fasting are done on men. Women are known to have a higher stress response in the morning time (cortisol levels). Then, add in caffeine, cardio, and not eating, and you are setting yourself up for cortisol overload! It is not healthy to chronically put this much stress on our bodies. What we find is skipping breakfast actually causes us to become more unhealthy. We start to have irregular blood sugar, mid section fat storage, thyroid and sex hormones can become dysregulated, we can feel more anxious… sounds disastrous right? This is why eating breakfast is so important! We want to make our body feel safe and that is done with a protein + fat + fiber rich breakfast!
Metabolism Support- muscles are metabolically expensive. They require a lot of calories to sustain themselves and grow. We know that muscle is the main driver behind our calorie burn throughout the day. If you are skipping a meal in the morning, then you could be missing out on a lot of important calories and nutrients to help your muscles (aka you are causing a slower metabolism to occur)! What I find is a lot of women skip breakfast, eat a light lunch, and then eat junk all evening long. This just does not set ourselves up for success! Breakfast is a great time to get in 30g protein and healthy carbs + fat to support our metabolism and get us off on the right foot for the day! Take advantage of it!
Morning Workouts- our bodies utilize calories, carbs, protein, extremely efficiently around workout time. Your body wants to replenish its glycogen stores (stored carb in muscle)! ! This is when we should be eating!!! So, if you workout in the morning, and are waiting until 1-2pm to eat, you are doing yourself a major disservice to your progress in the gym. Not only from a performance standpoint, but also from a body composition standpoint! If you are doing this, I would imagine you feel pretty tired throughout the day if you are not eating until post workout. Do yourself a favor and fuel your morning workout with something small, carbohydrate dense, and recover with some carbohydrates and protein!
If you are looking for ideas on what to eat for breakfast my Gray30 course provides you endless options and teaches you how to balance your blood sugar right out of the gate! Stop starving yourself and start seeing results!
You can check out my Gray30 course at the link HERE.
-Emily