Breakfast, the most important meal of the day?

I've heard over the years that, on average, we will lose 7 years off of our life if we don't eat breakfast almost every morning. I'd have to say breakfast is THE most important meal of the day. I'm not your average person, I eat 6-10 times a day and lift weights 5-7 days a week with heavy cardio worked in. Being into bodybuilding, the affect on my body if I do not have breakfast is more than amplified. My body would be damaged if I didn't eat right when I wake up.

When asleep, we're in a fasted state. However long you're asleep, you aren't eating anything. Just because we're asleep, it doesn't mean our body isn't burning calories. Our BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is the rate at which our body burns calories to maintain the same size it is. You can search "BMR Calculator" on Google.com and you'll get multiple calculators, any one of them is fine. Your BMR is how many calories your body burns if it was laying in the same spot for a 24 hour period, it does not take extracurricular activities into account.

My BMR is approximately 2,000 calories. So, if you divide 2,000 by 24 you see that I burn about 83 calories an hour maintaining my current weight. Like I said, I eat 6-10 times a day. I don't go much longer than 2 hours without eating. If I slept for 8 hours, my body has burned approximately 665 calories. If I skipped breakfast and didn't eat until 3 hours after I woke up, my body burned 916 calories. That's a lot of fuel my body is using that I haven't put in, so it starts taking the energy from places in the body that need the energy.

Our body is designed to store back up energy in the form of glycogen (instantly usable energy) in our muscles that it uses if we've exhausted the energy that we consumed. Once this glycogen is used up, the body targets the primary fuel source in our brain. That's right, your brain can stop working properly if you don't eat enough energy. This isn't going to happen if you cut a few hundred calories but it can happen if you do extreme dieting and exercise.

In short, breakfast is the most important meal of the day because our body needs the proper recommend energy to start the day. If we don't eat breakfast, we risk having a more stressful day. Somethings I would  to eat for breakfast include:

Oatmeal with raisins
Peanut butter
Milk
Wheat toast
Whole-grain cereals
Eggs

These are very basic HEALTHY foods that I would recommend eating for breakfast. They're slow digesting and give your body the energy it will need for hours to come. I'm learning how to write articles more and more so I'm sorry if this is a bit sloppy, I will produce better and more informative articles as time goes by. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope it helps you out a little bit. Don't forget to eat breakfast!

Importance of sleep and exercise!

Hey everyone! So, I'm a college student and LOVE weightlifting/body building. I workout MINIMUM 5 days a week and usually turns out to be 7 days a week. I've created this post to stress the importance of nutrition, sleep, and stress on the body while going to school.

I've gone from a very obese 230 pounds about 4 years ago to a now trim 185 pounds. I've done A LOT of trial and error and have learned pretty well how things work. During the 1-2 month breaks from school, I usually go crazy at the gym. When I get back to school, it's time to take care of business and bodybuilding isn't part of the education business for me. So here's a few tips for the average college student that love working out and weightlifting!

Light exercise:

If you workout 1-3 days a week, there isn't much need to watch your diet and sleep down to the point. Even if you're lifting HARD 3 days a week, you still wouldn't have to stress getting enough sleep or necessarily eating enough food. Chances are, everything will balance itself out over the week. Just make sure you have a well balanced diet and get an average amount of sleep (5-8 hours).

Moderate exercise:

(3-5 days/week)
This is where diet and sleep need to be a little bit more precise. If you're working out HARD, like 1 1/2 to 2 hours of heavy weights, then you NEED to make sure you're getting that sleep and enough protein in your body to heal your muscles. If you're not taking in enough calories and/or not getting enough sleep, this can start to put a mental stress on you as well as a physical stress. Your muscles won't heal as quickly because they heal the most during you REM sleep (deep sleep) and REM works in intervals, sleeping 5 hours might cut off an entire interval or two. Concentrating on school will become much harder if you're lacking any of these significant resources.

Heavy exercise:

(5-7 days/week)
If you're working out 5 to 7 days a week, it is VERY easy to wear yourself out. The more you work out, the more calories you burn. This means, the more you work out, the more you need to eat. Our body's need time and resources to heal and continue the strenuous activities. I'd recommend getting AT THE VERY LEAST 7 hours of sleep if. I've noticed through years of trial and error, if I workout this often and don't get enough sleep, concentrating on school and/or work the next day is much harder. Let's factor in food now. Without enough protein, you'll be doing more hard than good by workout out this often. I try to go off of the 1.2-2g of protein per pound of body weight number that you see on the internet so often. Make sure you get a good carbohydrate source before your workout (oatmeal, wheat bread, brown rice, etc) and a sufficient amount of healthy fats spread throughout the day. Without enough food in our body, we literally won't have the resources to concentrate and grasp complex concepts.

I'm transferring to a 4 year university next fall and figured I'd share these tips with everybody else. I don't want to see people making the same mistakes I made and go through weeks or months of being tired through out the day and not being able to pinpoint the cause. Hope this helped a little bit, I did this straight from the top of the head so it's not as good as it could be, just some advice from me to you! :)

America the...starving!?

So, according to CDC.gov approximately 68% of America is overweight and over 1/3 of Americans are obese! After taking history and political science classes, I've learned quite a bit about my country's history. (I know people from other countries will read this.) Many English settlers traveled across the ocean to find a new and hopefully improved life in the Americas. Many of these settlers died because their body's were too weak to fight off illnesses, hunger, or the weather. It took many, many trips of settlers to come over until we were finally able to learn how to "colonize". We learned how to have enough food and survive by working together with the land.

Today, America continues to starve. Our "prosperous" country has a lot of food and for good prices, but is this food nutritious? Up until about the late 1980's there were no such thing as "fat kids" in school. You might have your occasional overweight or chunky kid but nothing like we see today. Today, we live such a fast paced on-the-go life that we would much rather go for the more convenient food rather than the healthy more time consuming food. I believe technology has gotten us so lazy to the point of death. Kids would much rather sit on the computer than go outside. They'd much rather play video games than ride their bike. Parents don't understand that they are raising a very, very unhealthy generation.

Food these days is terribly un-nutritious. I'm not one to complain about preservatives or ingredients in food but the number one thing on my list that I believe is killing our youth is high fructose corn syrup. It's a super concentrated sugary syrup that is in pretty much everything you eat or drink that is sweet, even JUICE! That's right, 95% of the juice we drink isn't even actual nutritious juice. It's sugary syrup with added vitamins.
A 12 oz can of coke contains 39 grams of sugar. Who actually only drinks 12 ounces of soda? I usually drank 32 oz or more. That's about 150 calories of energy ALONG with the meal you're eating. The reason this high fructose corn syrup is so bad for us is because it contains fructose, which has been known to cause insulin resistance and diabetes.

The reason we get fat is because we have too many calories that our body doesn't need. Sugars digest VERY quickly and turn into energy FAST. If we don't use that energy, our body naturally stores it for later. This is a survival technique that our body's have developed over thousands of years to survive times of little to no food. The problem with this survival technique, our country consumes WAY TOO MUCH SUGAR and we don't do enough CARDIOVASCULAR ACTIVITY. Just a little something on my mind that I needed to rant about.

This isn't VERY informative but over my years of bodybuilding/diet altering, I've come to the conclusion that many people are unaware of what I've outlined in this very unorganized blog. I promise my next one will be much more organized and detailed, but for now...Carpe Diem!