You probably get between 6-8 hours of sleep a night. Hopefully. That’s a long time to deprive yourself of food. Your body consistently needs nutrients to build or maintain muscle mass, and most importantly, to keep your body functioning properly.

Now, most people may not have their first meal until lunchtime. On top of sleeping hours, if you add another four hours from when you wake up to when you eat lunch, that is around 10-12 hours without food in your system!

So why is breakfast so important? Why is it “the most important meal of the day”? The answer is simple:

When you are sleeping, your body goes into starvation mode since you are not eating anything. As a result, your body triggers a natural defense mechanism that decreases the amount of fuel it burns in order to conserve energy. Your body uses up its glycogen stores (carbohydrate stores), which are found in the muscles and liver.

Therefore, when you wake up, your body is tired and less able to function. When you “break the fast,” you replenish your body with glycogen stores that boost the body’s metabolism.

As soon as you wake up you should consume breakfast. The longer you wait to deprive your body of food, the longer it will take your body to function properly.

Besides giving you physical energy, breakfast has been proven to improve memory and cognitive functions. Eating breakfast improves mental performance by improving your ability to focus, understand, and perform tasks.

The biggest meal of your day should be breakfast. This is because you are giving your body the most time to burn off the meal as energy throughout the day.

Dinner should be one of your lighter meals because you never want to go to sleep on a full stomach. Most of the food will just sit in your body during the night since you are not being physically active enough to burn it off. As a result, you will gain fat from doing this.

What people don’t realize is that breakfast may actually promote weight loss. When you skip breakfast you are more likely to be hungry throughout the day. As a result, you may be more likely to binge eat.

If you skipped breakfast and don’t have access to a proper lunch or even go too long without eating, you may be much more tempted to go to the vending machine and eat unhealthy foods. In addition, you could over-eat, which may cause your body to consume to the point where you cannot properly digest the food and therefore it is stored as fat.