Breakfast of Champions

Poached eggs and a pile of bacon.

And the best part? The kids turned down the waffles.

[UPDATED: I should clarify that we were at a restaurant (Calafia in Palo Alto). We don't keep waffles in the house!]

Cereal Killers

I love these:

More here.

Not So Fast

For most of the past year, I've been practicing intermittent fasting. After finishing dinner each night, I'd abstain from eating until lunchtime the next day. It worked well for me, and I still do it a few days each week. But since March, I've been downing a post-workout meal of starchy carbs and protein every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. And more recently, even on my rest days, I've been devouring a big breakfast before heading off to work.

Example: Here's this morning's beefy, bacon-y, eggy morning meal. (Doesn't it look happy?)



The reason I'm no longer fasting every day?

Some days, I haven't gotten enough sleep. Other days, I've been sick with a cold. Either way, I wasn't about to tax my immune system even more by fasting. No sleep? No fast.

Besides, I'm finding it hard to resist the smell of meat in the morning.

Good Morning

My breakfast was incredibly easy (even for me!) to throw together: savory coconut pancakes (just three ingredients: egg, coconut flour and salt) topped with bacon (cooked in the microwave) and avocado. It took less than five minutes to throw together.

I'm downing all the bacon I can before the Whole9 crew tells me I have to stop.

And if you haven't guessed yet, I'm not fasting through the morning every day anymore. More on that later...

Breakfast Cereal = Meth in Milk

(Source: Cracked.com)

Light-Up Cereal Boxes

Because kids need greater incentive to ingest artificially-processed sugar bombs for breakfast.

No, Really: Skip Breakfast

In the news: More evidence in support of fasted training and minimizing carb intake.

Belgian researchers worked with three groups of human lab rats: One group ate a ton of food and remained sedentary. The other two groups exercised -- one after eating a "hefty, carbohydrate-rich breakfast" and the other after eating nothing at all. (They ate post-workout.)

The experiment lasted for six weeks. At the end, the nonexercising group was, to no one’s surprise, super-sized, having packed on an average of more than six pounds. They had also developed insulin resistance -- their muscles were no longer responding well to insulin and weren’t pulling sugar (or, more technically, glucose) out of the bloodstream efficiently -- and they had begun storing extra fat within and between their muscle cells. Both insulin resistance and fat-marbled muscles are metabolically unhealthy conditions that can be precursors of diabetes.

The men who ate breakfast before exercising gained weight, too, although only about half as much as the control group. Like those sedentary big eaters, however, they had become more insulin-resistant and were storing a greater amount of fat in their muscles.

Only the group that exercised before breakfast gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance. They also burned the fat they were taking in more efficiently.

(Source: New York Times)

Fasted Training?

I recently received an email from a reader asking me what I eat before my morning workout.

My answer: Nothing. As you may recall, I've adopted an intermittent fasting protocol, and I'm exercising on an empty stomach.

Some people think I'm insane for diving into CrossFit workouts ten or twelve hours into a fast. How do you have the energy? they ask. Don't you bonk halfway through your workout? Are you not aware that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?

Certainly, fasted training isn't a good idea unless your cortisol levels are already in check. But if you're  (one of the few of us) getting good sleep, keeping your stress levels low, and aren't pushing your body beyond capacity when exercising, working out without food in your belly is something to consider.

Fasted training can help increase endurance and boost the body's ability to store muscle glycogen efficiently. And as Chris Highcock pointed out, it can help you recover faster from endurance exercise. Plus, from an evolutionary perspective, it's been pointed out that our cavemen ancestors likely exerted themselves most strenuously while hunting for food -- not after they'd filled their stomachs with a meal.

And by the way, breakfast is by no means "the most important meal of the day." That's just a marketing slogan that breakfast cereal makers dreamed up decades ago (and still reverberating in the echo chamber of lazy science, agribusiness marketing, and the informational cascade). Don't swallow the hype: Skipping a meal doesn't "slow your metabolism" and make you fat.

A Little Something On The Side

Ever notice how weekend brunch places always load up your plate with cheap but filling grains? Even if all you're interested in eating is a hunk of steak with some eggs, or maybe a few slices of crisp bacon and plump sausages, the restaurant often insists on loading up its "specials" with a pound of hash-browned potatoes or a half-dozen slices of toast. If you're eating Paleo like me (or low-carb or Atkins or whatever), you don't touch the stuff, but you're charged for it.

Solution? Order a bunch of sides. You can pick exactly what you want. Plus, it's usually cheaper than ordering a pre-set breakfast combo (though not always -- make sure to check with the server if the prices of sides aren't printed on the menu.)

Example: I ate at a local brunch spot this morning with the kids, where an order of the restaurant's lamb sausage breakfast platter (lamb sausage, 2 eggs, hash browns and toast) will set you back $11. I chose instead to order a side of lamb sausage, a side of 2 eggs, and threw in a side of bacon to boot. Total cost of the three sides: $9.

Waste not, want not. And it was tasty -- especially with a generous drizzle of house-made hot sauce.

Nothing for Breakfast

I haven't had breakfast -- any food before 11:30 a.m. -- for months.

Since August, I've been playing around with intermittent fasting (IF). This might sound bizarre to some of you, but as the Drs. Eades have pointed out, IF has been shown to have a number of benefits, including:

• Improving longevity;
• Reducing the risk of cancer and other diseases (ranging from heart disease to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's); and
• Improving insulin sensitivity and blood glucose regulation.

As reported last year in the L.A. Times:

During fasting, almost every system in the body is "turned down," [U.C. Berkeley endocrinology professor Mark] Hellerstein says. The body changes how it uses fuel. Certain hormone levels fall. Growth stops. Reproduction becomes impossible. "By the end of three weeks of fasting you are a completely different metabolic creature," he says. "It affects many, many processes -- but in a somewhat predictable way that takes you toward disease prevention."

Oddly enough, scientists don't yet know why IF produces these health benefits.

One theory is that the process produces just enough stress in cells to be good. "What our evidence suggests is that nerve cells in animals that are on dietary energy restriction are under mild stress," [Mark] Mattson [of the National Institute on Aging] says. "It's a mild stress that stimulates the production of proteins that protect the neurons against more severe stress."

But whatever the reasons, IF seems to work. And it has other practical benefits, too, like:

• Increasing growth hormone during fasting (which helps build and maintain muscle mass);
• Weight and body composition maintenance; and
• Not having to make breakfast.

I know: You think this is utter bullshit. After all, "breakfast is the most important meal of the day," right? We hear this a lot -- but has anyone come up with any science to back this up? Or do we get an earful about how you need to "eat lots of small meals a day -- starting with breakfast -- to fuel your metabolism"? Because that's a load of hooey. Studies have shown that eating small, frequent meals doesn't do anything. But can you work out in the morning in a fasted state? I do, and I'm doing just fine. IF doesn't impair exercise. If anything, it boosts fat loss.

Let's review: A consistent line of research (going all the way back to the 1940s) demonstrates that IF confer lots of health benefits. And science has also disproven the theory that constantly grazing on tiny portions of food throughout the day somehow improves health.

You know me: Based on what I'd learned, I had to give IF a try.

More after the jump...