BREAKFAST HABITS – Get Fit, Get Healthy, Get Confident: Week 4

Another week of being a better person has gone by and some of you had successes, some of you had setbacks. It’s expected. It’s understandable.

We fall down, we brush ourselves off and we keep on going.

For those who had the strength to join Sonya and I today, you’re awesome!

If you’re new, WELCOME! Feel free to put your name down on our virtual list of participants here.

RULES:

1. If you haven’t yet, join the challenge here: GET FIT and GET HEALTHY
2. Every Saturday come back to The Art of Making a Baby and ShutterMama to read the tips on how to be fitter, healthier and more confident.
3. Weekly write a post about your progress, following the questionnaire below, take a self-portrait (optional) and link up with us.
4. Don’t forget to grab the GET FIT challenge button on the sidebar and display it proudly on your blog or GET FIT post.
5.  Link your post with Selfie Saturdays if you took your week’s self-portrait.  

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So today I’d like to discuss something very important to me that changed the way I eat: Breakfast habits

I was never a big breakfast eater. None of that eggs, bacon, sausage patties + a stack of pancakes for me. I went through years of not eating breakfast at all ( not good), and then eating whatever I felt like (not good), until I finally stumbled onto a concept that made a lot of sense to me and changed my mornings completely.

That concept was introduced to me by an old book that my booker from the modeling agency gave me to read and follow before I could go to New York. A lot of things in that book shaped my current eating habits, but the idea behind the whole concept is what blew my mind.

Basically, as many of you might know, we eat for one reason and one reason alone: FOR ENERGY. Food shouldn’t be for pleasure or indulging. We were meant to eat food for survival. That’s why we have taste buds, and that’s why we find food so good tasting, because year after year of evolution  allowed only those to survive who were motivated enough to find their own food ( and honestly, would we want to hunt days and nights on end for food that doesn’t even taste good? I don’t think so). Actually sexual pleasure has the same reason. If sex didn’t feel good, how would we ever procreate in the stone age and continue our line?

So we eat food for ENERGY. Calories = Energy.

However, 3500 unused calories equal 1 pound of fat. So next time you look at that scale and see that you’ve gained 1 pound, please know that it’s exactly 3500 calories that you ate that your body didn’t need and didn’t burn.

What many of you didn’t know is that there’s one process in our body that requires more energy (calories) to accomplish than anything else. It’s digestion. It’s a very complex and very important process, therefore our body puts a lot of priority on digesting your meal and extracting every possible nutrient and calorie it can. Have you noticed that how after a big meal ( Thanksgiving dinner, anyone?), every single person unbuttons their pants and goes into a coma. That’s your body at work prioritizing and taking the energy away from your body and giving it to your GI.

So that means we need food to have energy and we need energy to “have” food.

Now what happens in the morning is that we wake up from 8-10 hours of sleep without any expendable energy, because , well, we didn’t eat all night. Then most of us go ahead stuffing ourselves with eggs and bacon, and refined carbohydrates and syrup, mixing all that mess of protein and carbs and sugars in our tummy and expect it to digest. Except our body has no energy to digest it yet. The worst thing is meat has the toughest time digesting, especially when mixed with grains. We keep taxing our system like this day after day without even realising how much damage we’re doing to our colon.

Some people don’t eat breakfast at all, robbing their body of that needed energy to function first thing in the morning.

The solution is FRUIT. Fruit is the only thing that is partially digested in your mouth by saliva. So by the time it hits your stomach, it needs very little to finish digesting giving you a little burst of energy to continue functioning. Then in about an hour or less after the first breakfast, you can allow yourself to eat some of the heavier foods, being assured that your body can handle it.

Either way, it’s never a good idea to mix meats and starches and grains, they don’t digest well together, because they need different digestive juices. Meat and veggies, and grains and veggies is your best option. And I’d leave meat till later in the day anyways. So get up and before you even had your morning cup of coffee, have a fruit or two.

There’s a school of thought that believes that it’s important to have protein in the morning. That’s not a problem. Have the 1st breakfast of fruits (fruits alone, no sauces, no dipping, no sugar), and then continue in about an hour with your choice of protein.

I’ve been eating like this for 2 years now, and I gotta tell you, I’d never go back to no breakfast or heavy breakfast.

Cutting back on coffee is a good idea too, since most of you don’t realize how addicted your body is to the caffeine ( and anything that hinders your functions is never good). Apples has similar effects on a human brains as caffeine does, making you feel more awake in the morning.  My husband followed suit and quit coffee cold turkey after being a 2-3 cup drinker, and he had withdrawals for 5(!!!) days. He, as well declared that he’ll never go back to drinking caffeine after experiencing the kind of effect it has on your body. Coffee in itself isn’t that bad, but it’s the addiction and, how disabled it makes us feel if we don’t have it every morning, that is troubling.

Give me your thoughts on this!

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Now, my entry for week 4

1.  Height: 5’11″, weight: 132 lb  {-1lb, not good, need to get back to 133-135lbs}

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NOW LINK UP!