When we eat, what we eat and how we eat are all factors that can either have a positive or negative affect on how we function throughout our day.

If you’re a breakfast skipper then you are falling into the biggest trap of all. People who usually don’t eat breakfast say they have no appetite. “It’s too early to eat”, “I’ve never eaten breakfast” and “I just couldn’t stomach a thing” are common excuses for putting off the first meal of the day. I think some people believe they are doing themselves a favour by skipping breakfast, thinking it may actually help them lose weight.

The reality is that this habit does more harm than good. If you haven’t eaten breakfast by mid morning or lunch time your blood sugar will be so low you will probably eat anything that is put in your reach. All rational thinking goes out the window at this point and that will power that was so strong in the morning as you left the house is suddenly gone. You’ve had nothing to eat since your dinner last night. So if that was at 7pm or 8pm, then you haven’t had anything to eat for almost 15 hours! No wonder your body and mind feels wrong. I don’t know any ‘healthy’ individual that can function optimally mentally or physically with no food for a significant amount of time. And if it is done on a daily basis then problems can start to set in fairly quickly.

If you’re a busy person who skips breakfast, picks on small amounts of food all day then has their biggest meal of the day at dinner time then you are falling into a similar trap. The majority of your calories are being consumed when you don’t need them, towards the end of the day, or at night. Calorie restriction all day hinders weight loss as it forces your body to slow its metabolism down to preserve as much energy as possible. Your body doesn’t know what you have in store for it, its just going into conservation mode.

Finish eating 3 hours before you go to bed. You don’t want food in your stomach when you are asleep. It should be in your digestive tract by this stage. If you go to bed on a full stomach then you usually won’t sleep as well. When we sleep digestion is slowed down. If there’s food in our stomach when we sleep then we will probably wake up not hungry, prompting us to skip breakfast again.

We need a certain amount of calories to function and this is different for everyone due to their gender, age, activity levels and weight. If you don’t provide this to your body in sufficient quantities and quality then you will inevitably end up eating all the wrong things at the wrong times of the day. Exactly what you don’t want or need.

What you eat also plays a big part in hunger, or hunger prevention. Have you ever noticed that people who eat a lot of processed foods tend to need to eat more? This is thought to be because they’re actually craving nutrients, vitamins and minerals, which are very lacking in manufactured foods. So they have cravings, and hunger as they’re body is seeking balance. It’s a vicious cycle because the person usually just eats another meal of processed, nutrient void food again, not realising what they’re body is actually needing.

I like to think of our bodies like a fire which needs good wood (food) to burn hot and bright for hours at a time. If we throw a piece of paper on a fire it burns up really quickly and we need to put more on almost instantly or the fire will go out. This is what sugar is like in our bodies. We burn through it really quickly and if we don’t eat more of it we will inevitably have a blood sugar crash, making us feel tired, sleepy, irritable and hungry. It really is a vicious cycle isn’t it?  So if you put redgum wood on your fire then it is going to burn hot for a long time which can be compared to meals which are balanced nutritionally with clean proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Your body has no choice but to respond favourably when you feed it the right nutrients at the right times of the day in sufficient amounts.

So always eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, snacking only if necessary. Evenly distribute your meals in relation to time and nutrients, ideally eating more at the start of the day and smaller amounts towards dinner.

© Kylie Pogson 2006

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