Breakfast very simply means the first meal after you have fasted, when we break our fast. You might be thinking, “I don’t fast”, but we all do, to a greater or lesser degree. We all fast when we sleep, which hopefully for most of us will be 6/8 hours, depending on what our individual bodies need. If you eat your last meal at 6pm, and do not consume any food or drink that contains calories until 8am next morning, you will have fasted for 14 hours. Which is classed as IF, an intermittent fast.
Our bodies understand that we will naturally fast overnight, the dawn phenomenon is activated each morning to help us prepare for the day.
Our blood pressure rises a little, to help us to not feel dizzy when we stand up, after lying down for hours overnight. Our blood glucose levels increase marginally, to give us energy; this is why it is inadvisable for diabetics to use the pinprick test to check their glucose levels in the morning, as it will give a false high. For those of us who don’t eat carbs, the liver will not have stored sugar to release. So it will activate gluconeogenesis (production of new sugar made from naturally occurring amino acids) to give our bodies the energy boost.
I used to eat cereals or toast for breakfast, maybe even crumpets if I felt like a real treat. Which I now understand is high in carbs, and therefore sugar. When our body consumes over a teaspoon of sugar, just 4 grams, our pancreas needs to send insulin to stop the blood having too much sugar circulating. Eating carbs too early in the day, when we already have a naturally occurring rise in blood glucose, puts extra strain on the pancreas.
When I first started Keto, I changed to having bacon and eggs for breakfast. Very quickly, once I became more sensitive to ghrelin, the hunger hormone, I found I didn’t need breakfast, as I genuinely wasn’t hungry. My body can then carry on fasting a little longer, and can utilise the benefits of autophagy.
Click here to read about autophagy.
As ever, the above is not medical advice, just what I have researched and learned from my own experiences over the last six years.
