Optimize Your Health, Fitness & Vitality with Brien Shamp

Start Strong: Eat A Healthy Breakfast. If you don’t, you will tend to overeat the rest of the day.

As mentioned in an earlier post, we must eat frequent meals to optimize our metabolic rates (burn more calories even at rest). To start the metabolic furnace, we must break the fast!  Those who skip breakfast may be without energy intake for 12 hours or more. Let’s say you ate your last meal at 7 pm and didn’t eat your first meal until noon the next day. That would be a 15 hour fast and would lead to major physiological stress. Your stress hormones would increase in activity due to the lack of fuel to operate your basic metabolic functions, regardless of how much fat you are storing.

Many tell me they skip breakfast because they are not hungry. Not being hungry is a self-programmed model. Hunger should not be used as an indicator to eat or not eat. If you are hungry or thirsty, you have waited way too long to eat or drink.  If you were in a coma, you would never wait until you were hungry to ask for food or water. In this state, you are given a saline solution for hydration and a total parenteral nutrition intravenous solution that will allow your body to function. We are in constant need for fuel.

From the high obesity rates, you would think we were an overfed society, but really we are a malnourished society (many of the calories consumed are processed crap and take massive energy to digest). Most of the calories are consumed in a short period of time and this model creates havoc because we do best with frequent, small feedings.  Start your day right and break the fast as soon as possible to rev the metabolism.

There are a few more things to consider:

- If you work out in the mornings, you should not eat within one hour of training, but you want to consume your breakfast and post-workout meal within one hour.

- If you do not workout out in the mornings, eat within one hour of waking to break the fast.

In the ideal world, everyone would wake up, consume 1-2 glasses of water with lemon, workout for at least 30 minutes and eat their largest meal within 1 hour.  As for what to eat for breakfast, consider reducing your carbohydrate amount to a level where you feel satisfied immediately and 1-2 hours after your meal. 

Brien Shamp brings you 22 years of experience as a Body Transformation Expert, Personal Trainer, Nutrition & Lifestyle Coach, Massage Therapist, Strength Coach for College & Pro Athletes and Reiki Practitioner. In 2011 he was nominated one of the top ten trainers in the country. Brien has a degree in Biomechanics from UC Davis and extensive graduate studies in Exercise Physiology from SF State. Brien won first place in the Met-Rx World’s Best Personal Trainer Contest in 1999 and was nominated Best in the Bay by KRON 4 for Weight Loss in 2009. He is an active author in Parenting on the Peninsula, Ms. Fitness Magazine and his FREE Blog with thousands of subscribers at www.BrienShamp.com.