Here’s Why You Should Eat Breakfast Like a King & Dinner Like a Pauper

from INH Health Watch 

About a quarter of Americans skip breakfast, and new research finds this growing habit is causing us to pack on pounds. Eating a morning meal jump-starts the body’s digestive processes, and it leads to greater calorie burning throughout the day. Those are the findings of an extensive review of recent studies by the American Heart Association (AHA). It found that skipping breakfast is linked to a higher risk of obesity and diabetes, and it showed that making breakfast the biggest meal of the day can pay big weight loss dividends.

One of the studies cited by the AHA was done by researchers at Loma Linda University School of Public Health. It was published in The Journal of Nutrition.

The researchers looked at the eating habits of more than 50,000 generally healthy adults. They found that eating a robust breakfast and then tapering off to a smaller lunch and a light dinner with no other lifestyle changes caused steady weight loss. Over the course of a year, subjects had a decrease of up to 5%.
Eating the meals in the reverse order—light or no breakfast, heavier lunch, and heavy dinner—had the opposite effect. The researchers said it caused weight gain.

Dr. Hana Kahleova is a research fellow in nutrition at Loma Linda University. She led the study. Dr. Kahleova said there are biological reasons the body burns more calories when you front-load your food earlier in the day. The pancreas is more responsive in the morning. It produces sugar-burning insulin faster. This means the morning is when “our body can use the nutrients as a source of energy the easiest,” she said.
A person eating a heavier meal in the evening will deposit more of the calories as fat because there’s not enough insulin to burn them, she said. Her advice? “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

Israeli researchers found similar results. They recruited 93 obese or overweight women ages 30 to 57. They were all put on identical healthy 1,400-calorie-a-day diets for 12 weeks.

The women were split into groups based on the timing of their meals. Half the women consumed 700 calories at breakfast, 500 calories at lunch, and 200 calories at dinner. The remaining women did the exact reverse. They ate a 200-calorie breakfast, 500-calorie lunch, and 700-calorie dinner.

At the end of the 12 weeks, women in both groups lost weight. But those who ate the big breakfast lost far more. They had dropped 2-½ times as much weight as those who ate a light breakfast.

Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz is professor of medicine at the Wolfson Medical Center in Tel Aviv. She was lead study author. “The time of the meal is more important than what you eat and how much you eat,” she said. “It is more important than anything else in regulating metabolism.”

The AHA review noted that family life often revolves around eating big meals at the end of the day. But if you want to lose weight, “The message is very straightforward: Make breakfast your largest meal of the day, and eat dinner as your lightest meal of the day,” Dr. Kahleova said.

Remind Your Clients What Happens When They Stop Exercising

from the Elivate e-zine
Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion…and bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. (Newton’s 1^st Law of Motion)

We all know the benefits of staying active, but sometimes our clients need to be reminded of these benefits (and negative effects) over and over again, before they truly understand just how important persistence and consistency are when it comes working out. I recently read this great article in Outside Magazine by Dan Roe, which reminds us to remind our clients of 5 things that happen when you stop exercising.

When a planned rest day turns into a rest week or a nagging injury keeps you out of the game for longer than anticipated, you expect a little guilt over dropping your exercise habit. But we consulted the experts to break down what happens when workouts grind to a halt and what they have to say may surprise you. It’s okay to take time off, but there are physiological changes that you should be aware of. The good news: while some gains do vanish overnight, most are reversible or don’t take much effort to maintain.

Blood Pressure Rises: In the short term, your blood pressure will change within a day depending on whether you work out or not. “With blood pressure, things happen very quickly, and they also cease very quickly,” says Linda Pescatello, a blood-pressure researcher at the University of Connecticut. Exercise causes increased blood flow, meaning your arteries temporarily widen to facilitate greater circulation. They tend to stay slightly larger for about 24 hours, but if you don’t get your heart rate up within a day, your blood pressure returns to baseline.

Skeletal Muscle Starts Resisting Insulin: When we exercise, our muscles process insulin and absorb the resulting glucose as energy. Reduce that energy expenditure and your muscles will adapt physiologically to become a little less insulin sensitive, says John Thyfault, a researcher at the University of Kansas.

Muscles Shrink: You’re going to get soft and small—and it’ll happen fast. The visible gains you made from a lifting routine will start to diminish within a week of quitting the weights.

VO2 Max Drops: VO2 max—the maximum amount of oxygen you can get into your system—matters because it helps determine your cardio capacity and performance potential.

Grumpiness Takes Over: A single workout, hike, swim, run, or ride almost instantly makes you happier, thanks to a rush of feel-good endorphins. But turn that one afternoon outing into a long-term daily habit and you’ll see bigger mood boosts every time, according to a study in Psychosomatic Medicine. Get out of the habit and your emotional drop will be much steeper, too.

Additionally, staying active may fight anxiety. Michael Otto, a psychologist and professor at Boston University, explains that exercise can mitigate anxiety by firing up your fight-or-flight response, the evolutionary trigger for adrenaline, sweat, and increased heart rate when faced with a challenge. When you stop exercising, your body forgets how to handle stress. Because you’ve allowed your natural fight-or-flight response to atrophy, you’re less likely to experience something tough—whether an interval workout or a stressful workplace relationship, in a positive way. Instead, you get anxious.

“Many people skip the workout at the very time it has the greatest payoff. That prevents you from noticing just how much better you feel when you exercise,” Otto said in an article for the American Psychological Society. “Failing to exercise when you feel bad is like explicitly not taking an aspirin when your head hurts. That’s the time you get the payoff.”

The Unselfish Art of Prioritizing Yourself: Why taking care of ourselves and doing what we love is NOT selfish

from the PsychAlive e-zine

Most of us are taught from an early age that being selfless is a good thing. There are many benefits of altruism to both our mental and physical well-being. However, sometimes the message we receive to be giving of ourselves, to push ourselves to the limit, to be productive, and to forgo our needs can be taken to an extreme in our everyday lives. If we’re not attuned to who we are and what we want, we can start to make sacrifices that don’t just hurt or limit us, but in truth, negatively impacts those we care for. Maintaining a certain regard for ourselves and engaging in self-compassion and self-care are fundamental to creating a good life for ourselves and the people who matter most to us. Here’s why:

1. When we feel depleted, we have nothing to give. When we fill our time with responsibilities and constantly prioritize the needs of others over our own, we often drain ourselves of energy and desire. We’ve all experienced the difference between giving from a feeling of having something to offer, for example happily getting our kids ready, helping a colleague at work, cooking a meal for our partner, doing a favor for a friend, and making ourselves do these same activities because we “should.” We can feel drained, strained, and may be going through the motions but not engaging in a way in which everyone benefits – i.e. our kids feel nurtured, our job feels rewarding, our partner feels seen, and our friend feels cared about. If we are kind to ourselves and considerate of our own needs, we are more likely to show up fully and happily for the people to whom we extend ourselves.

2. Doing what we love recharges us. When we’re lit up and excited, we have more energy and positivity to offer the people around us. The time a parent “takes off” for a date night or an employee uses to rest instead of working until all hours is not self-centered. Just because it feels good to us doesn’t mean it denies others. In fact, by tending to our own needs and practicing good self-care, we alter the very quality of how we relate to others. Our families, friends, and coworkers get to experience us as the best or fullest versions of ourselves – happy and present.

3. We lose our real selves in the “do, do, do” mentality. I know many parents who go above and beyond for their kids on a practical level. They literally pack every minute of their day being chefs, chauffeurs, coaches, and clean-up crews for their kids. I also know people in relationships who focus on doing everything they can think of for their romantic partner. However, when we fall into a cycle of “go, go, go,” we’re often tallying up achievements that we use to prove our worth, but rarely stopping to experience what makes our hard work worth it to us. We may sacrifice our own interests altogether or stop enjoying personal connections that make us feel like ourselves. In doing so, we give up aspects of ourselves, but the people close to us also miss out on really knowing us.

4. We can drain others when we don’t get our own needs met.  One of the best pieces of advice my colleague Pat Love often gives to parents is to get their adults need met by other adults. When parents center their entire lives around their kids in an effort to be selfless, they actually put a lot of pressure on their kids to fulfill their lives and meet their needs.  It’s so much better for kids to witness their parents as full and fulfilled people in and of themselves, thereby experiencing their parents’ example and not just their devotion. This is true in all of our relationships. If we don’t practice self-care and find healthy ways to meet our needs as individuals, we tend to have less energy, complain more, drag our feet, feel more resentment, criticize ourselves and others, all of which can be draining to all the people we are seeking to benefit by setting aside our own wants and needs.

5. We lose ourselves to our “critical inner voice.”  When we are preoccupied by a drive to be “productive” or “helpful,” it’s valuable to look at what’s pushing us. Are we doing what we do because we truly care and want to be of benefit? Or are we driven by something else? Many of us have an inner critic that tells us we have to achieve certain objectives to be acceptable or worthy. This harsh internal coach tends to attack us from all angles and reinforce the idea that anything we do for ourselves is selfish. When we’re listening to this “voice,” it’s easy to lose track of what’s really going on around us. Are we living our lives in a balance way? Are we really doing justice to the people around us by being present and feeling good? The critical inner voice is a huge distraction that affects our mood and behavior, and it can often be at the helm of an unrealistic desire to be “perfect” and always put others first.

6. We fail to practice self-compassion. One of the risks of becoming lost in all the things we should be doing for others is that we stop feeling for ourselves. It’s no surprise, research has shown that being kind to ourselves and practicing self-compassion improves our well-being.  It also benefits the people around us. Researcher Dr. Kristin Neff has also argued that having a kind attitude toward ourselves actually makes us better able to look at our mistakes and make real changes. In addition to self-kindness, she describes two other key elements to self-compassion: mindfulness, which involves learning to accept our thoughts and feelings without over identifying and being overcome by them, and a sense of common humanity, which means not seeing ourselves as isolated or different in our struggles. If we can take time to practice self-compassion, we can feel more comfortable to be ourselves, and we can extend a more compassionate attitude to others.

7. Our stress hurts us and those close to us. Our failure to stop and check in with ourselves and make time for the things that are meaningful to us can increase our stress. Filling our lives with responsibilities can generate a cycle in which being stressed feels like the norm. As a society, we are unapologetic about our stress levels, even wearing them like a badge of honor, proving our value. However, stress takes a serious toll on our mental and physical health. These effects often catch up with us and prevent us from enjoying our lives, not to mention that they affect how we relate to others, often leading to more conflict, tension, and acting out in our relationships.

8. Driving ourselves can impair our performance. Research by The Energy Project recently found that workers who didn’t practice good self-care, like getting enough sleep, often have trouble focusing on one thing and are easily distracted.  Their findings led The Energy Project’s CEO, Tony Schwartz, to conclude, “If you do not put your needs first, then ultimately you will not be able to perform well and show up for others consistently and happily.” Taking care of ourselves not only makes our personal lives better, but it makes us into stronger assets at work.

For many of us, there are good lessons to be learned about being generous and giving of ourselves. However, when we lose touch with our own unique life force, the grand passions and tiny quirks that make us who we are, we diminish the quality of our lives. It’s all too easy to categorize certain pursuits as selfish rather than fighting to maintain the things that make us come alive. However, when we do make time for our wants and needs, we are more alive to the world around us, more available and more giving of our fullest selves. In effect, we are our least selfish, while still honoring our sense of self.

Why Do We Eat Eggs For Breakfast?

By Eileen Reynolds for “Well Done” E-Zine

Poached or scrambled, fried or boiled, tenderly Instagrammed orinhaled via McMuffin, eggs are the undisputed workhorse of the American breakfast. As a kid who wouldn’t touch them—the smell alone made me gag—I spent a lot of time bitterly contemplating this fact while cobbling together strange restaurant meals from the forlorn “sides” section of the menu. Collegiate poverty would eventually cure me of my childish aversion, and I now eat eggs in all forms, but I still wonder sometimes about their automatic association with morning appetites. Why do we eat eggs for breakfast?

The question is best tackled in two parts, and the first is easy. We eat eggs because they are a miracle, one the otherwise sober Oxford Companion to Food gaily describes as the “astonishing and unintentional gift from birds to human beings,” and the acme of food packaging.” People have eaten eggs—whether hen, duck, ostrich, quail, or, in the case of the ancient Egyptians, even pelican—in almost all cultures and eras of human history. Eggs appear in Cro-Magnon cave drawings and on Assyrian cuneiform tablets.

The ancestors of today’s domesticated chickens originated in south and Southeast Asia before 7,500 B.C., and the Chinese had built duck egg incubators by 246 B.C. As the editors of Lucky Peach put it in All About Eggs, “eggs are what humans have in common.”
The same can’t be said for breakfast, which is where answering the second part of the question gets complicated.

Whereas much of the world has long taken a strictly utilitarian approach to breakfast—in many places the go-to remains a warm (often caffeinated) liquid plus a grain—in parts of the West, whether and what to eat upon waking has been known to occasion a moral panic. Is a substantial breakfast good or bad for body, mind, and spirit? The American iteration of that debate came to center around eggs in particular, and has been shaped by two centuries by ever-evolving attitudes toward health, virtue, and class.

Ancient Romans appear to have begun their day with an energy-boosting meal that involved some combination of bread, cheese, olives, salad, dried fruits, eggs, and cold meat leftover from the night before. But by the Middle Ages, Europeans had downsized from the Romans’ three meals to just two per day, nixing the early morning nibble. St. Thomas Aquinas identified “eating too soon” as one of the six subtypes of gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins, and those who indulged in breakfast may have been assumed to nurse other “lusty appetites” as well, Heather Arndt Anderson suggests in “Breakfast: A History”.  
There were some exceptions: children, the elderly, and sick people got a pass, and laborers who needed calories for the workday would’ve eaten bread, cheese, and ale. But the healthy and well-to-do either abstained or lied about their boorish breakfast habits, possibly getting their fix inside bedchambers with only servants as witnesses.

In time, the prohibition softened. By the late 1500s, Queen Elizabeth I was known to eat a breakfast of ale and oat cakes. Coffee and tea—introduced to Europe through trade in the 17th century—became wildly popular, and the Church ultimately loosened breakfast restrictions most people were already ignoring anyway. 

Coincidentally, the 15th and 16th centuries were a boom time for egg recipes, when those who couldn’t afford meat could nonetheless raise hens on very little land, and the Church removed eggs from the list of animal foods not to be eaten during Lent. By 1620, English medical writer Tobias Venner was recommending two poached eggs sprinkled with vinegar as a healthy breakfast—though still with the caveat that this wasn’t strictly necessary for sedentary people, students, or anyone between the ages of 25 and 60.

It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that breakfast really came into its own as a distinct and openly celebrated meal. For factory laborers, sustenance before the grueling workday was more essential than ever, and for the rich—thanks to plentiful household help, easily transported ingredients, new-fangled gadgets, and eventually, electricity—breakfast provided an opportunity to show off newfound wealth. In England and America, the wealthy made omelets and built breakfast parlors—entire elegantly appointed rooms to stage the multi-course meal orchestrated by a bevy of servants. And the brand new middle class imitated those habits with their own attempts at morning excess.

Eggs were useful in that endeavor. In 1875, cookbook author Marion Harland praised them as “elegant and frugal,” advising thrifty housewives to make use of the “nutritious and popular” staple that in the wealthiest homes played second fiddle to costlier meat dishes served to impress. One surprised English visitor to the Midwestern prairie in the 1850s, at the height of this American breakfast golden age, described a particularly extravagant morning feast of “hot and cold bread of different sorts, including corn bread, little seed cakes, pancakes, preserves and blackberry syrup in large soup tureens, hot beef steaks, roast and boiled chickens, and various sorts of cold meat.” This was essentially dinner for breakfast, a spread that would make eggs benedict, invented in New York a few decades later, seem like a light snack by comparison.

 A predictable consequence of all that conspicuous breakfast consumption was chronic indigestion, known at the time as “dyspepsia,” Abigail Carroll writes in Three Squares: The Invention of An American Meal.(Given all the complaints of heartburn, belching, and nausea, one wonders what to make of a warning, in the 1899 Dictionary of Dainty Breakfasts, that scrambled eggs “should never taste of Vaseline.”) While popular wisdom held that the condition was caused by eating underbaked bread, some physicians theorized that it could be cured by replacing meats and eggs with a lighter meal of grains. Hence, breakfast cereal was born, and eggs would have to fight for their place at the table like never before.

Luckily, they had public relations pioneer (and nephew of Sigmund Freud) Edward Bernays in their corner. Hired by the Beech-Nut packing company to help deal with a surplus of bacon in the 1920s, he scored a major victory for team fat by rounding up a group of doctors to say just the opposite of what the cereal evangelists had concluded. A heavy breakfast—specifically bacon and eggs—was good for you. The widely publicized “study” helped permanently cement the pairing as the ideal American breakfast.

Eggs were useful in that endeavor. In 1875, cookbook author Marion Harland praised them as “elegant and frugal,” advising thrifty housewives to make use of the “nutritious and popular” staple that in the wealthiest homes played second fiddle to costlier meat dishes served to impress. One surprised English visitor to the Midwestern prairie in the 1850s, at the height of this American breakfast golden age, described a particularly extravagant morning feast of “hot and cold bread of different sorts, including corn bread, little seed cakes, pancakes, preserves and blackberry syrup in large soup tureens, hot beef steaks, roast and boiled chickens, and various sorts of cold meat.” This was essentially dinner for breakfast, a spread that would make eggs benedict, invented in New York a few decades later, seem like a light snack by comparison.

 A predictable consequence of all that conspicuous breakfast consumption was chronic indigestion, known at the time as “dyspepsia,” Abigail Carroll writes in Three Squares: The Invention of An American Meal. (Given all the complaints of heartburn, belching, and nausea, one wonders what to make of a warning, in the 1899 Dictionary of Dainty Breakfasts, that scrambled eggs “should never taste of Vaseline.”) While popular wisdom held that the condition was caused by eating underbaked bread, some physicians theorized that it could be cured by replacing meats and eggs with a lighter meal of grains. Hence, breakfast cereal was born, and eggs would have to fight for their place at the table like never before.

Luckily, they had public relations pioneer (and nephew of Sigmund Freud) Edward Bernays in their corner. Hired by the Beech-Nut packing company to help deal with a surplus of bacon in the 1920s, he scored a major victory for team fat by rounding up a group of doctors to say just the opposite of what the cereal evangelists had concluded. A heavy breakfast—specifically bacon and eggs—was good for you. The widely publicized “study” helped permanently cement the pairing as the ideal American breakfast.

The Multi-headed Hydra of Prejudice

BY CAROL TAVRIS

A friend of mine, a lifelong Democrat, lives in a retirement home in one of the most liberal cities in California. One day at lunch he decided to sit at a table of residents he didn’t know. He soon realized that they were all Trump voters, enthusiastically expressing their pleasure with the election. “Finally, we won’t have to look at that nigger in the White House any more,” said one woman. My friend was stunned. “Look,” he said, “it’s OK for us to have political disagreements, but I’m deeply uncomfortable with your using that ugly word.” “Too bad,” she said. “We can say whatever we really feel now. To hell with your political correctness.”

I’ve long been annoyed by, and written critically about, the language police on many college campuses, where well-intentioned efforts to ban “offensive” words and deeds frequently lurches into preposterous and sometimes funny extremes. In the prologue to the latest edition of his best-selling sex-information book, The Guide to Getting It On, Paul Joannides writes:

I’ve given up trying to please people who insist that every word of every sentence must not offend a single person on the entire planet. I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say “a woman’s clitoris” because it might offend people who are transgender. So instead of using words like “woman” or “man,” I’m supposed to say “a person with a clitoris and vagina” or “a person with a penis.”¹

So let’s stipulate that none of us likes being told we can’t say what we think, and that we shouldn’t think what we feel. But the kind of political correctness that Joannides laments at least has the benefit of trying to make people aware of the uses and consequences of language, as adding “or she” did to the former norm of using the generic universal male to encompass women. It pales next to what the Trump voter meant by the phrase. For her, and others like her, being “politically correct” means that somehow they have been forced to suppress their racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic feelings. (Suppressed? Have they never been online?) […]

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