What is a normal breakfast for you?

I happily eat 3 meals a day, and a snack. I am also very healthy. Certainly not slim, but none of the women in my family have been, it's our build. We are tall and strong. My strength was what attracted my fiancé to me when we first met, I impressed her with how easily I wheelbarrowed pig shit up the pile. I digress..

During the work week I have a cup of black coffee and a slice of homemade sourdough (rye, acorn, buckwheat, or any other flours I can find all in rotation). Currently I'm adding about 5% sunroot powder too. I'll have that with nut butter or some homemade jam. In the winter I also really enjoy porridge. Usually rolled oats or groats, but I also like to mix grains. I cook it up with some applesauce or other fruit and chopped nuts, and sweeten with maple syrup. And in the summer, raw quick oats with fresh berries from the garden and a splash of pumpkinseed milk.

Weekends we make a little more effort and will do either a buckwheat pancake with compote or fresh fruit, or a tofu scramble with toast or roast root veg. I love breakfast!

Kim Wills wrote:Well... I agree and I disagree. Sure we store excess calories that our bodies can use if needed. But just because we can survive a mini-famine doesn't mean we'll be at our best or not have negative consequences if that state goes on for too long. And I have nothing against fasting, for most people. I know there are some benefits.
But there is also such a thing as "overweight but undernourished". People can be overweight or obese but be vitamin or mineral deficient; they may not look like they're wasting away, but in a small way, more people are than we'd think. Someone who lives on processed foods, fast foods, microwave meals, etc, can quickly acquire excess fat but not have enough nutrients. In any case (calorie deficit or nutrient deficit) our bodies will take what it needs from our own bodies (including protein, calcium, whatever). Many people think that if they go without food their body will start burning all its fat, and that's it. Stop eating and lose weight. But that comes with invisible costs, including eventual "starvation mode" where they'll start retaining fat (if it's a very long time of undereating).

Nutritional imbalances (vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, etc) are definitely a problem for many people, but that is pretty much unconnected to the calorie topic that I quoted.  Calories are a pure energy measurement and don't correlate closely with nutrition.  You can consume many calories without gaining much nutrition and can eat very nutrient-dense foods that minimize calories.

The body is actually rather good at handling fasts and works to preserve important nutrients and bodily health/function.  It even has a mechanism for recycling old, useless, non-functional and even cancerous cells (autophagy) when it is scrounging for nutrients and energy during fasts.  This actually can provide important health benefits.  One downside of our "world of plenty" and western eating habits is that our bodies never have these periods of fasting that allow us to burn the fat that we commonly accumulate and prevent us from rejuvenating the organs of our body via autophagy.  

Pretty much all of our chronic, modern health problems (obesity, type-2 diabetes, type-3 diabetes/Alzheimers, PCOS, heart attacks, increased cancer rates, etc, etc.) can be directly traced back to our current diets.

Again, the "starvation mode" that you are talking about is definitely the exception, certainly in modern societies.  That describes the stereotypical "bloated belly" malnourished child pictures from some third world nations.

Cujo Liva wrote:Many societies, both currently and historically, have no real pattern of eating breakfast at all which is why that marketing pitch was created in the first place.

Don't confuse "need" with "need to eat".  Many of us have had years of practice at storing excess calories, so a large percentage of people have absolutely no need to eat 1600+ calories every day.  This dates back to our earliest pre-history where food was not consumed as regularly as now with available restaurants, supermarkets and pantries.  Humans have practiced fasting from the very beginning.  I understand that there are legitimate cases of people "wasting away", but that is a comparatively niche problem in modern societies right now.

Funny timing on this comment. A few years before my experience at boot camp above, or hearing the term "intermittent fasting", I remember hearing a news snippet that stuck in my mind. Interjected into radio programming, it was a 'researchers have found' story framing that normally makes my eyes roll, but in this case had an odd ring of truth and relevance that made me retain it among hundreds of other long forgotten blurbs.

It was simply a study on Asian (I think it was specific to China but don't recall for sure, or perhaps Korea or Japan?) eating habits among the aged. The claim was that it was a cultural norm for elders to only eat one meal per day, and that people in this culture were among the most long lived on the planet. The study showed a strong correlation between longevity and those that held to this norm. I chalked it up to being the wisdom one of the most ancient, ongoing cultures, and it seems to fit with the more benevolent science-based speculation I've encountered on the subject.

Coydon Wallham wrote:It was simply a study on Asian (I think it was specific to China but don't recall for sure, or perhaps Korea or Japan?) eating habits among the aged. The claim was that it was a cultural norm for elders to only eat one meal per day, and that people in this culture were among the most long lived on the planet. The study showed a strong correlation between longevity and those that held to this norm. I chalked it up to being the wisdom one of the most ancient, ongoing cultures, and it seems to fit with the more benevolent science-based speculation I've encountered on the subject.

Intermittent and longer-term fasting is ancient knowledge and part of every major religion- Old and New Testaments, Ramadan for Muslims, etc.  Prehistoric peoples had naturally-forced fasting when times were difficult.  Our bodies are well designed to deal with it, but we've become addicted (by the literal definition) as a society to highly-palatable foods and frequent meals/snacks.  Just ask the average person to give up unnecessary high-carb foods (breads, sweets, salty snacks, soft drinks, etc) and see if their reactions aren't identical to an addicts even down to the withdrawal symptoms and frequent failures and going back to the addictive behavior.

Many of us simply aren't well educated on the topic.  Not surprising really.  It is a pretty niche topic and the food and medical industries have had strong financial incentives to convince us to eat larger quantities and more often.  Did you know that the tobacco companies that employed scientists to make their products more addictive years ago ended up buying major food brands and used the same techniques to create many of the "food products" that are making us fat and unhealthy today?  They've been working on this for decades, so our society has largely forgotten about fasting and making our own meals from highly nutritious/natural ingredients and we are paying a heavy price in our health.
https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-news/many-of-today-s-unhealthy-foods-were-brought-to-you-by-big-tobac.html

I love milk. I grew up drinking a ton and I've joyfully continued that habit.
Most mornings my breakfast is somewhere between a pint and a quart of raw grass-fed A2A2 milk.
For me, this staves off hunger and doesn't leave me feeling heavy or sluggish.

Though, since this past summer, I haven't been able to fully get back to my routine of also skipping lunch/snacks throughout the day.

Coydon Wallham wrote:I stumbled on my most productive eating routine while participating in the Wheaton Labs Bootcamp.

I was at WL for the 2024 PTJ, and had quite the opposite experience.
With delicious food provided for me three times a day, I could hardly resist!

I'll be heading back to WL for 8 days starting this coming Saturday and hopefully will use that as a springboard back to the 22/2 (22 hours on, 2 hours off) intermittent fasting method my body was loving earlier last year.

Clay McGowen wrote:I was at WL for the 2024 PTJ, and had quite the opposite experience.
With delicious food provided for me three times a day, I could hardly resist!

Oh, for sure, I would never think of snubbing Paul's generous offer of wholesome vittles during an event! The late breakfast was during a multiple month stint in bootcamp, and is something I tend to do in regular life now, but it is not rigid dogma I've subscribed to.

Going off the map here. I suspect a single meal or shorter window for eating each day would provide health benefits over a strictly maintained three meals a day schedule for reasons mentioned above, but also think there is an over-arching element of variability and serendipity in eating schedules that is necessary for a fully healthy and flexible lifestyle, one that operates outside of the farm/factory worker routines that were engineered for citizens in the wake of the industrial revolution.