For the first quarter of your life, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when “scientists” and “leading researchers” and “your mom” tell you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s because it’s hard for us to understand how a bowl of Lucky Charms could possibly be healthier than eating nothing. In my house, it was the Eggo waffles. Is some really poor nutrition, some empty caloried-frozen thing, better than no nutrition at all?
As we get older and flee the nest, it becomes a money thing. It becomes a time thing. Once we become more independent, we are faced with the truth that, to our dismay, nothing in life is accomplishable without money or time. This is especially applicable to eating breakfast.
Here’s a spoiler alert before we go any further: “scientists” at “NaturalNews.com“–which I trust because I feel like they probably give good face time to kale–say that breakfast is imperative for the following six reasons: “energy boost,” “help you focus better” (actually, if “breakfast” is the assumed subject of that sentence, it should be “helps you focus,” technically), “prevent you from gaining weight,” “boost your metabolism,” “help decrease your LDL cholesterol,” and “prevent heart attacks.”
With that in mind, breakfast is obviously CRUCIAL to LIFE. It is for me, at least. I’m a breakfast person.
I always have been. I say that not because I’ve always been so obsessed with breakfast, but because I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t eat breakfast. It was just… so… normal.
We were a cereal family growing up. Still, to this day, my younger brothers and my father all eat a bowl cereal together after dinner. It doesn’t matter how full they are, how the Cap’n Crunch mixes with the lamb chops and spinach aftertaste. It’s ritual. At my dad’s 50th birthday party, my mom had the ingenious idea of setting up a “cereal bar” for dessert. We love breakfast.
Breakfast has seemingly always been an important part of my life, which is, I think, perhaps the primary reason why I’ve become accustomed to its importance. I can tell you what two of my best friends in high school ate every day for breakfast, and that’s not because I ate breakfast with them every day. I actually never, on weekdays, ate breakfast with either of them, yet breakfast is just so important that I knew their routines just as I memorized mine. Caryn had an egg white omelet and sometimes a bowl of soup. Don’t ask. Nicole had a Dannon yogurt, not Greek, and a Luna bar. Ugh. I love those two.
I had cereal. Or granola. Then I’d go through phases of oatmeal. My mom loved making oatmeal and cream of wheat for me in the mornings. There was a short phase my senior year of high school where I gave up on breakfast. It was a time thing. The weird thing, though, is that I lost a sizable amount of weight my senior year of high school, which seemed to contradict the fact that breakfast helps you lose weight. I think that was a sort of magic trick on my end, also called “stress and anxiety and moderate symptoms of depression,” and today I can’t imagine not eating breakfast without needing a very serious brunch around 11am. I wouldn’t survive past then and, in the process, wouldn’t lose a pound.
The real case I have for breakfast, though, is that it is my coffee. I’ve become such a creature of habit, such a creature of breakfast, that I don’t feel fully awake in the morning until I’ve eaten it. I may or may not have convinced myself that I’m just super weak and malnourished in the morning and I need those nutrients to wake up and get moving. Maybe it’s true. I’m not sure. But I’m not a coffee drinker–only in times of desperate exhaustion–and the feelings I have pre- and post-breakfast are identical to the feelings coffee drinkers describe.
To put it in brief: breakfast starts your day off on the right foot. It is delicious. Breakfast foods are really some of the best foods. It revs the engine. It gives you something to look forward to the night before. Something to look forward to when you wake up.
Eat your breakfast.
Image via The Infatuation.