Do your work before breakfast

I’ve only recently started to realize that eating breakfast might not be better than eating breakfast right after getting up in the morning.

You can hear many health and nutrition “experts” almost nagging at people to eat three times a day and how important breakfast is.

Based on what evidence?

People have been living literally hundreds of thousands of years eating irregular meals. Did the cavemen sit around the table to eat their oatmeal after waking up? No. They went out hunting and gathering. In those times, you were lucky to eat at all. Sometimes days went by before you got a proper meal.

Intermittent fasting, ketogenic diet, and not eating breakfast seem most natural to us. So, I thank you for your advice, but I’m going to go with what has worked for thousands upon thousands of years.

Another reason is based on my own experience. I’ve noticed that if I don’t eat breakfast and only drink coffee (black, no sugar, no milk), I’m hyper-focused. On the other hand, if I do eat before starting to work, my mind is hazier. I can still focus, but I don’t have that same clear, razor-sharp attention.

From an evolutionary biology point of view, this makes perfect sense. If the cavemen hungry, they needed that strong focus in order to maximize their chances of securing a food source - to maximize their chances of survival basically.

On the other hand, if you’ve just eaten, your body spends its energy and resources to digest the food, and for your brain, there’s no real need to spend energy on anything else. It’s not a priority.

We can use that extra focus on doing our work instead as nowadays we don’t exactly need to do a lot of thinking to have a meal.

Some people say they can’t go without breakfast. Of course, you’ll feel this way, if you’ve lived your whole life this way. I also always ate breakfast and didn’t imagine not starting my day without it. Most things take a little bit to get used to.

KRISTJAN