Read this interesting article by Fredric Patenaude and just had to share! Read his thoughts below…

Skipping Breakfast – By: Fredric Patenaude

We are told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. “Eat like a king for breakfast, a prince for lunch, and have dinner like a pauper” is an old saying. The truth is, for most of human history, people of all cultures have typically only eaten two meals a day: lunch and dinner, or sometimes breakfast and lunch, with a light dinner. The ancient Romans ate an early breakfast, a very light lunch, and a large dinner. In all examples you can find in history, people only had two large meals a day, and sometimes skipped the third one entirely.

The word “breakfast” in French (déjeuner) also means “breaking the fast,” but actually means the lunch meal, because that’s when people had their first meal of the day (breaking the fast). Eventually, as French people got wealthier, they started having something in the morning, and came up with the term “little breakfast” (petit déjeuner) to describe that morning meal.

Having regular meals is important, but skipping breakfast or any other meal occasionally does not have the terrible consequences that are expected. A healthy person, with a healthy blood sugar, can easily skip breakfast without the terrible “blood sugar crash” that people expect when they don’t eat anything in the morning. In fact, if you can’t skip breakfast without feeling bad, it typically reflects the poor state of your health and your reliance on stimulants like coffee and sugar.

A recent study published in the Journal of Physiology showed that working out on an empty stomach has tremendous health benefits

(http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/phys-ed-the-benefits-of-exercising-before-breakfast/)

Having a big breakfast before a workout, or in general, is especially bad for you. If you have a big breakfast, you should only do so after working out. Researchers found:

 ”The men who ate breakfast before exercising gained weight, too, although only about half as much as the control group. Like those sedentary big eaters, however, they had become more insulin-resistant and were storing a greater amount of fat in their muscles.

Only the group that exercised before breakfast gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance. They also burned the fat they were taking in more efficiently. “Our current data,” the study’s authors wrote, “indicate that exercise training in the fasted state is more effective than exercise in the carbohydrate-fed state to stimulate glucose tolerance despite a hypercaloric high-fat diet.”

Another reason people may not eat breakfast, or have only a coffee in the morning, is because they eat late at night or snack after dinner. Skip this. It’s much better to eat during the day and burn off the energy, than to eat at night when you’re sedentary and then go to bed.