Your BIG Breakfast Questions Answered

Hello, my Healthy Fam!

Today I am answering the questions that I receive as a nutritionist time and time again about breakfast:

• Is breakfast the most important meal of the day?

• Do you need to have breakfast?

• What if you are not hungry for breakfast?

• Is it ok to skip breakfast? Will it spike your cortisol level?

• Why are you still hungry after oatmeal?

• What does the breakfast of the nutritionist look like to slay the day?

Let's begin!

Do you need to have breakfast? Why do people skip or are not hungry for breakfast?

It is natural for our body to get some sort of nourishment at the beginning of the day. You had a nice gap of rest and sleep and hence a break from eating since dinner the day before. So to begin a new day your body requires some nourishment.

I know people in both categories: those who are ravenous in the morning and barely make it to the kitchen to make their breakfast and those who have coffee and can postpone their breakfast until midday.

I’d say that skipping breakfast completely might happen in some healthy cases where, for example, when a person is doing a keto diet, and so the appetite naturally goes down due to the presence of ketones in the blood or if a person is doing intermittent fasting.

However, the most common reason why people are skipping breakfast and eating at 1 p.m. for the first time that day might be that something generally has gone off. 

What I have seen from many client food diaries, the most common reasons for not feeling hungry in the morning are:

1. heavy late dinners the night before or 

2. alcohol consumption, or

3. when a person generally consumes substances that require the body to detox them from the system - these include artificial substances like flavourings and colourings, nicotine pills, or if a person is smoking or if a person is constipated. The reason for that is that the body’s metabolic state in the morning is focused on cleansing and detox, and while it is still working on it, a person might not have any appetite at all.

In those cases, I’d like to recommend removing the problematic food or substance and improving your diet and hence regular bowel movements.

I recommend reorganising your eating schedule in a way that your dinner becomes lighter and moved earlier and your lunch and breakfast become more nourishing. Gradual steps in this direction are the best strategy. And by the way, the heavy distribution of food onto the evening hours might be the direct cause because a person got into this habit of skipping breakfast, the most classic reason is simply not having enough time and running late to work or school. 

If you skip breakfast for years, you of course get into the habit of eating this way even if you don't drink alcohol and don't have other factors mentioned above. But this is a habit that I strongly recommend dropping if you want to sleep better, improve digestion and liver function and lose weight easier.

When is the best time to have breakfast?

Many nutritionists say that the best time to have breakfast is within the first 1,5 hours after waking up to stimulate bile flow and start digestion. Otherwise, the destructive stress hormone cortisol will spike and people will not get enough protein and fats that day and stay malnourished. I strongly disagree with this opinion. Cortisol will spike only when you are resisting your hunger for a long time, and when your blood sugar is dropping very low because of that.

I recommend listening to your hunger signals and eating breakfast when you are experiencing true and clear signs of physical hunger. Going against it raises questions for me that it's a 'healthy' approach. So if you are very hungry at breakfast time, by no means have a nice nourishing filling breakfast. If you need to wait 2 or 2,5 hours until you feel hungry for breakfast, then that’s the time you need to give yourself and eat breakfast only when you are physically hungry.

In many cases postponing your breakfast if you need to finish some intellectually challenging task in the morning can be very valuable, especially if you are following a low-carb diet plan or a ketogenic.

Is breakfast the most important meal of the day? 

First of all, what you should know is that the slogan "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" actually comes from the marketing campaign by Kellogg's back in the day when they were popularising breakfast cereals. Therefore, to promote breakfast cereal they came up with this marketing strategy which has been so effective that it is still a belief many people hold till the present day.

My answer to this is that while you can totally mess up the first part of your day by eating a bad breakfast (more on this a bit later), your lunch and dinner are as important and also play a role in your health and weight management. There is no more significance over other meals, and each meal plays its important role.

And finally, to illustrate my point, remember that having a good healthy breakfast (not sugar-loaded breakfast cereal) cannot and will not compensate for unbalanced lunches and dinners later in the day.

Not hungry after oatmeal: “I know it is healthy, but I can’t stay full”. 

I hear this complaint very often from my clients who come for a consultation.

Staying full after eating oatmeal very much depends on each individual's hormonal regulation of appetite and the stomach's secretion. However, oatmeal, even the one that's made from whole steel-cut oats or Scottish oats / stone-ground oats is not the most filling food. It consists mostly of carbohydrates and it lacks proteins and fats that promote a feeling of satiety.

If you like to keep porridge in your morning routine, I recommend adding healthy fats, like coconut oil or MCT oil and some source of protein like a boiled egg.  But generally, if this doesn’t work (as for me, I get hungry in 2 hours if I eat oatmeal) and if you are not fixing your gastritis or ulcers, for example, or not recovering after any other cause of stomach irritation, or IBS, GERD, indigestion which call for extra gentle diet, then I suggest removing oatmeal from breakfast. Yes, it is better than packaged breakfast cereal or croissants, but not as good as protein-rich or lower-carbohydrate options.

What does the breakfast of the nutritionist look like to slay the day?

My favourite and most recommended breakfast type is based on eggs and healthy fats like avocado and coconut oil and I also add some sort of vegetables to my breakfast. I may have leftover cooked vegetables from dinner or some cabbage and carrot salad I batch make ahead, or grate courgettes or butternut squash into my omelette and slice some fresh tomatoes paired up with leafy greens to put as a side. I also like wholegrain crispbread, it has a great flavour! Just get the one that has no refined wheat flour or hidden sugars.

All of this can be adjusted to your characteristics, such as the state of the digestive system, whether you have any stomach problems or IBS, intolerances and so on. 

Prefer to listen to a podcast?

Here's a link to an episode on this topic that I've recorded on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Let me know in the comments if you are a breakfast person or do you normally skip it? If you skip it, have you recognised your causes of not having breakfast in the reasons above?