Breakfast
Is it Better to Eat Breakfast or Not?
Let’s talk about breakfast. Some people wake up ravenous; others get nauseous at the sight of food in the morning. Also, patients often mention that somehow they are hungry again too soon after they’ve had breakfast, even a hearty one. For someone, porridge is a super-filling breakfast, while the other one eats porridge and feels sick and hungry an hour later. This leads us to the conclusion that a standard 5-meals-a-day plan with porridge for breakfast does not suit everyone. So if you’re nowhere near hungry after waking up, or a typical oatmeal breakfast doesn’t fill you up, you have absolutely no reason to feel discouraged and think that something is wrong with you.
Such opposite pre- and post-breakfast reactions depend on the INDIVIDUAL hormonal control of appetite and the type of GASTRIC SECRETION.
Hunger is triggered by blood glucose levels, the speed at which blood sugar levels drop under the influence of insulin. But insulin is not the only hormone regulating blood glucose levels; there’s another and very important one – cortisol (a hormone of stress, hunger, and circadian rhythms). The cortisol levels peak in the morning hours in order to give our body a daily boost of energy. Cortisol intensifies insulin action, which is why some people feel hungry again soon after they have breakfast.
By the way, drinking strong coffee or tea on an empty stomach increases the production of cortisol. However, it doesn’t help to speed up your metabolism and rather has the opposite effect. The bottom line is: it’s much better to drink water than coffee on an empty stomach.
For all these reasons, we should not let our levels spike in the morning, so refined carb foods must be avoided: no sweet cakes with freshly squeezed juice, no crumpets.
Avocado toast with egg makes a wonderful filling breakfast; porridge also fills up great. When it comes to breakfast, timing is less important than quality (the ingredients it’s made of). There are no standards that work equally well for everyone. The extent of fullness that various foods give us, as well as the speed of digestion and assimilation, depends on the type of gastric secretion.