Health & Fitness
Maybe You Should Rethink Your Breakfast!
Intermittent Fasting May Help You Achieve Optimal Health
Last blog I talked about the “evils” of grains/cereal which is a staple for a fast, convenient breakfast. A recent study found that eating a breakfast high in protein, such as eggs and meat, makes you less likely to binge on junk foods later that night, but even this may not be the best breakfast choice.
Maybe, omitting breakfast entirely, as part of an intermittent fasting schedule has been shown to actually have many health benefits, from improving your insulin sensitivity to shifting your body into burning more fat instead of sugar for fuel. Eating first thing in the morning coincides with your circadian cortisol peak which impacts your insulin secretion; so that when you eat during this time it leads to rapid and large insulin release, more than other times of the day. If you are healthy, your blood sugar levels won’t drop to a dangerously low level.
Intermittent fasting, known as “scheduled eating”, means limiting what you eat to a narrow window of time each day. Ideally, this is a window of about 6-8 hours. This means you are fasting for 16-18 hours. Ideally, you stop eating three hours before bedtime and not eat until lunchtime. This will get your body to shift into fat-burning mode. This has been working for me for over five years. Although when I started, this “intermittent fasting/scheduled eating” name was unknown. I thought that this was my “strange” nutrition plan which went against everything I was reading at that time. Once you shift to fat-burning mode, modern research has confirmed some of the benefits to be:
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- Normalizing insulin sensitivity
- Normalizing ghrelin levels also known as the “hunger hormone”
- Normalizing leptin levels also known as the “satiety hormone”
- Promoting human growth hormone (HGH) production
- Lowering triglyceride levels
- Reducing inflammation and lessening free radical damage
I suggest going at this slowly and adding morning exercise is a great plus. This is not for everyone, but maybe it might work for you like it did for me. Till next time.