Hey, it's Wendy and it's Jess and you're listening to the Food Heaven Podcast, your online resource for delicious and nutritious living.

Well, hello there. You're listening to another episode of the Food Heaven Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Today we're talking about a topic that is very important and that is breakfast.

I know you guys know that breakfast is important but today we're going to break down why it's so important and some of our tips and tricks for getting a healthy breakfast into your life and also what a healthy breakfast even looks like because sometimes it's not clear what we should be eating.

So I just wanted to start out by saying that the word breakfast derives from break fast and so literally.

And so when we're sleeping hopefully for those 78 hours and a night, right guys, we are not eating anything. Hopefully. You're not waking up in the middle of the night which has been known to happen on some sleep medications but that's another story.

So when we wake up, it's really important to break that fast with the meal and that's where breakfast comes in. I know that most of our patients that we work with don't eat breakfast every day and that is something we absolutely do not recommend.

We know it's tough if you don't eat breakfast but hopefully over time you can re-get in the style or the habit of eating breakfast. One other quick point.

If you don't eat breakfast, what I usually recommend to my patients is start small so instead of trying to go with the big omelette and fruit or in a toast, like your body is not used to it, you have to re-chain your body to get hungry at breakfast time.

So start with a cup or two of water in the morning for one week. The next week maybe you have a piece of fruit with the water. The next week maybe you add a yogurt.

So you just want to start small and work your way up until your body gets used to it. And now Wendy's going to talk about why breakfast is so important.

Take it away. I'm taking it away.

Alright, so why is breakfast so important? We came up with some studies. We did some studies that just spoke about some of the benefits of eating breakfast.

And so I'll go over four studies that we found to be pretty interesting. The first one links breakfast and diabetes. And so this one study skipping breakfast was shown to increase the woman's risk for diabetes.

And this was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. There's also another cool study that linked not eating breakfast with the increased risk for heart disease.

And this was seen in men ages 45 to 82. It was shown that skipping breakfast was associated with high blood pressure, insulin resistant and high blood sugar levels.

There's also a study on memory. This was published in the American Dietetic Association. It found that eating breakfast is shown to improve cognitive function related to memory and test grades for all our students out there.

Yeah, especially with my patients, I always tell them, make sure you eat your breakfast in the morning because then you can't focus in school and you can't get those good grades. So, sure, yeah, but especially for kids.

And then there's another cool study that linked having breakfast with weight loss. And this was a recent study. It showed that people who ate breakfast as their largest meal lost an average of 17 pounds over the course of three months.

The other participants, they had the same amount of total calories per day, but ate most of the calories for dinner. And so the large dinner group only lost an average of seven pounds over the same time period.

So, it's really important that you focus on if you are going to have these heavier meals that you try to get them during the earlier part of your day so that you can burn it off, hopefully walking and, you know, just staying active throughout the day.

Now we're going to talk about our top rules for eating a healthy breakfast that we tell all of our patients.

So, number one is to eat breakfast within one hour of waking up. That is so important because we want to jumpstart our metabolism to be efficient at burning calories throughout the day.

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