Your personal trainer in Smyrna GA highly recommends that breakfast is widely considered the most important meal of the day for a variety of reasons. Not only will it improve your cognitive functioning, make you feel more alert and can even improve your mood, but eating breakfast is an essential component to any weight loss or muscle building program.When you eat breakfast, you are literally breaking the fast you’ve undergone for the past 8 hours or so while you were asleep. During this time, your body was starved of nutrients and your metabolism was forced to slow to a near halt to conserve what energy was left.Weight Loss Your metabolism slows down during the night to conserve nutrients because over generations of evolution, our bodies have gotten very good and not allowing us to starve. Fearing the fast will be longer than just overnight like they frequently were for our ancestors, our bodies enter into a kind of starvation mode. This starvation mode will end and your metabolic rate will increase as soon as you start eating a well-balanced meal, so time is of the essence.
If you skip breakfast, you’re also skipping hours of metabolic activity that will help you burn calories even when you’re idle. Let your body do some of the hard work for you by making it a habit to eat breakfast within 30 minutes of waking up.There’s another reason to never skip breakfast if you’re looking to lose weight. Several studies have shown that people who eat breakfast regularly in the morning ultimately feel less hungry during the day and as a result consume fewer calories even with the extra calories from breakfast added in. If you’re trying to cut calories but are feeling hungry during the day, breakfast may be your answer. Muscle Building The process of protein synthesis (which is essentially how your muscles build) occurs for approximately 48 hours after weightlifting. I’ve already discussed how your body is starved of nutrients during the night, but this has a slightly different implication for weightlifters. Moderate to heavy lifting causes micro-tears in your muscle fibers, one of the causes of soreness. With the proper nutrients, protein synthesis can rebuild these muscle fibers to create bigger, stronger muscles. However, if your body isn’t getting enough protein throughout those 48 hours, protein synthesis cannot occur and your muscles will remain damaged. The bottom line: you won’t get much stronger and your muscles won’t get much bigger. If you skip breakfast, you’re further depriving your body of the protein it needs to repair your muscles. Aim for at least 20 grams of high quality protein right away in the morning to reboot the process of protein synthesis. Start Small if You Need To If you’re completely new to breakfast, it’s okay to start with something small, quick and easy. Look for a good balance of complex carbohydrates, high quality protein, and fat. Any good balance, even if it’s small, will be far better than nothing and will boost your metabolism and muscle building abilities.