I was raised on three meals a day, like most people in Western countries. Breakfast, lunch, evening meal. That was what everyone did, what was considered normal. If you can’t be at home for lunch, take sandwiches in a lunchbox for at school, university or work. And always eat the savoury sandwiches first, get the healthy food (a cheese sandwich for instance) down you in case you lose your appetite after and don’t want the rest of the meal anymore.
So I forced myself for years to eat at least a slice of toast every morning. But as I grew up I stopped looking forward to that morning meal. How could I feel hungry after a night of sleep, hardly burning any calories? It just didn’t work for me.
I finally stopped eating breakfast in my twenties. And I never missed it.
So far so good, right?
But: people don’t understand.
Society doesn’t understand.
Society expects you to eat and enjoy breakfast. Hotels offer ‘bed and breakfast’, holiday resorts offer ‘half board holidays’, meaning breakfast and evening meal included.You are expected to want to eat in the morning, and then maybe skip lunch, or eat out if you want something.
But even though breakfast is included in the price, you can’t make a sandwich and take it with you for lunch instead. Eat it now, or lose the right to eat what you paid for.
People will try to reason with you.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!
This was an advertising slogan by Kellogg’s, meant to persuade people to eat breakfast cereals, and not based on any scientific research. The slogan was launched in the 1950’s and slowly adopted by society, including doctors and nutritionists. Which just goes to show: if people hear something often enough, they accept it as fact, without querying it.
You need to kickstart your metabolism in the morning!
Excuse me, if my metabolism had stopped overnight, I wouldn’t have woken up. I would be dead.
Your metabolism does not stop while you are asleep, so you don’t need to kickstart it either. Your metabolism is actually quite clever and adjusts to your activity levels constantly.
If you don’t eat breakfast, you will snack more!
Well that is something I have control over, if and when I snack. Also, what does it matter if I consume the same amount of calories a few hours later than you do? It might just mean I am less hungry for lunch, and consume a smaller meal then compared to if I’d had an early breakfast. (Reader: I don’t snack in the mornings.. My first food intake of the day is lunch)
Snacks are unhealthy!
That depends on what you eat! Have a banana as a snack, not too bad. Handful of nuts – again, not bad. Have a ‘breakfast’ cereal bar – probably no higher in sugar than your bowl of crunchy nut cornflakes was. You can pick healthy snacks even if you didn’t have breakfast.
Snacking, or eating more than two or three small meals during the day, may not be such a bad idea. Eating large amounts of food means your stomach needs to be larger, your pancreas needs to release a large amount of insulin all in one go, you release a lot of fatty acids (cholesterol) into your blood all at once. And forcing yourself to ‘finish the meal, empty your plate’ like the post-WW2 generation learned, means you learn to ignore the feeling of being full and to eat on regardless.
So listen to your body, and only eat when you actually feel hungry, instead of when society dictates you should be hungry.
But didn’t your mother tell you not to skip breakfast?
Yes, she did. But at a certain moment, people are capable of doing their own research, listening to their own minds and bodies, making their own decisions.. My family accepts my refusal to eat breakfast, but many people around me still have problems with it.
Besides, who of us still does everything their mother told them to do as a child? Case closed on that one.
If I made you a nice breakfast, you wouldn’t be able to resist!
Please go away, I don’t need the smell of greasy fry-ups or the stodgy look of a bowl of porridge in the morning. Just accept my quirk:
I
Don’t
Eat
Breakfast
No matter what ‘Big Breakfast’ says, and how they have indoctrinated the world, causing the majority of people to now think skipping breakfast is a terrible thing to do. I know better. And I don’t do what Big Breakfast’s advertising slogan tries to make me do.
But: well done Kellogg’s for brilliant advertising.
