The proverb goes: Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.

What if we say, instead: “Eat a late breakfast (or skip it), have lunch like a king, and dinner like a sane person.”

Let’s see which one of the two makes sense for most of us? Read on …

Wondered why the majority of us in our school days never liked to ram any food down our throat (breakfast) before leaving home?

The simple answer to this is: We never felt hungry early in the morning or felt the need to energise ourselves before beginning the day – albeit, we carried a small box of snacks to munch during the pre-lunch break in our school – 11am or so.

This behaviour goes well with the compulsions of those days when we humans were hunter gatherers for centuries together. We left home at day break on an empty stomach to hunt for food. We didn’t need breakfast to begin our daily activities. We probably had our first meal sometime past mid-day followed by another meal (perhaps) – the leftovers from the day’s catch.

Interestingly, many athletes start their early morning training on an empty stomach. They don’t feel the need to pump food calories at that time of the day. It’s only later during the day that they feel the need for sustenance.

On the other hand the majority of us who are surrounded with myriad food choices (mostly processed and unhealthy items) are waiting and wanting to eat their first meal as early as possible. Meaning, we start the day by flooding our blood with high glucose followed by soaring insulin levels. And this kind of thing continues the whole day. No respite for the pancreas, no rest for the liver, and no down time for the body to process the built-up toxins. High insulin levels stimulated by processed carbs and unhealthy fats all through the day lead to insulin resistance and metabolic ailments.

Most of us eat because we are addicted to food (as if there is no tomorrow). We have been tricked and brainwashed by food propaganda machines into believing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day (so they can sell their products).

Conventional wisdom posits the question: Do most of us need to really eat early in the morning when the body has already made the provision to ensure the presence of adequate blood glucose to kick-start our day? The answer: You do not need to further top it up with grams of carbohydrates and make matters worse.

“The Dawn Phenomenon” (between 4 to 8 am), also frequently seen in type two diabetics, goes like this:
When you are chilling in bed at night your blood sugar drops because you are not eating anything in the night. Then there is a counter mechanism from within the body which ensures that your blood sugar levels don’t keep dropping: in fact, just before you are about to wake up there is a spike in your blood glucose levels by a few points so that you can get up bright and cheerful and go about starting your day without having to search for food.

This energy level can take you through a couple of hours of workouts, your household chores, and many such activities.

So try it out, if skipping breakfast helps you to feel good and makes you lose weight. Have an early lunch instead (noon to one pm).

Maybe a light healthy snack around 4pm and then straight for an early dinner (before 7pm).

Simply put, A) you have extended time between your previous day’s dinner and your present day’s meal, 😎 this way you are eating less number of times, C) you are not munching on processed foods filled with sugar, salt and unhealthy fats, D) most importantly, you are reducing inflammatory agents going into you body.

This way you can have good quality food, and have as much as you want – twice a day. That’s all most of us need!