Tuesday, April 1, 2008

The importance of Healthy Nutritional Breakfast

If you're looking at losing weight, and plan to start skipping breakfast, or are already skipping breakfast, then you are basically setting yourself up for disaster. Breakfast believe it or not plays a huge role in weight loss, brain function, and general health.

For the sake of this post however I'm going to talk about the importance of breakfast and weight loss.

While you're asleep your body's metabolism slows down in order to conserve the food in your stomach so that it lasts the entire night. When you get up the next morning your metabolism is still in a slowed down state. Breakfast is needed in order to jump start your metabolism. When your metabolism speeds up you burn more calories, thus aiding in weight loss.

Skipping breakfast also leaves you feeling very hungry, and 99% of the time this leads to snacking. Don't get me wrong snacking is fine so long as your not taking in too many calories, and so long as the snacks you chose are healthy and nutritious. Unfortunately when most of us snack, we eat things like doughnuts, cookies, candy, soda, pastries, and other very fattening and sugary foods. This is what will promote weight gain especially since your metabolism is still slow.

There are a lot of people out there who skip breakfast as of now, and their excuse seems to be that they don't have time for breakfast. Well that may be what if feels like but I assure you that taking an extra 10 minutes out of your day to eat one of the most important meals of the day, is well worth the effort. Easy breakfasts could be a bowl of cereal, eggs and toast, oatmeal topped with fruit, or fruit smoothies.

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