How eating breakfast made us weak(part 2).

We've been told that breakfast is the most important meal of our day. We need energy to start the day. We've already gone without food for so many hours while we were asleep, and stretching this any further can't be good for us. We just HAVE to eat at least SOMETHING before exerting ourselves, or we might even collapse. Or we might burn our muscles for fuel. We might even put our bodies into starvation mode, which means, we'll get fat from eating pretty much anything later that day.

This the second part of "How eating breakfast made us weak" series, which is a follow up to my introduction post about intermittent fasting. Here are the links:
https://steemit.com/life/@backyardgoonie/how-eating-breakfast-made-us-weak and
https://steemit.com/life/@backyardgoonie/living-it-upside-down-and-the-science-of-intermittent-fasting
Please take your time and go read them through to not get lost in between the lines. I'll be assuming you already know a thing or two about how the human body operates(a quick recap for those who already-read-the-previous-posts-but-forgot-the-essence-of-them: fasting boosts a hormone called insulin, fasting boosts HGH(human growth hormone) and you can burn fat by breathing).

At first I wanted this to be a detailed biology lesson, but then I decided to take do quite the opposite. I'll try to put it as simple as I can:

Since the beginning of time, we had to wake up, eat some food, then sleep through the night. But food was never in abundance. We either had to hunt, find or grow our own food. Even nowadays, we can either work for food, grow our own, or steal our roommate's. In any case, we need to put in effort FIRST so we can eat SECOND. And our body is pretty much made to work this way. Our body is either in a fight or flight situation, or in a rest and digest mode, sleeping through the night(for the skeptics out there, do some research about our thyroid gland, and how it's affected by food).

Our body is either awake and working or sleeping and regaining energy.

At least that's how it should be.

We get our energy through food. While food by itself is energy, we don't exactly get it as soon as we eat it. The food has to go through the digestive system first before our body can use it as energy. And it actually TAKES energy for the digestive system to operate(that's why you get sleepy after a good meal). Other than energy, it also takes TIME to operate, about 6 to 8 hours to fully complete. So from food to poop in a good nights sleep.

By eating in the morning, we're starting another digestive cycle. And not only it'll demand energy from us(instead of providing it), it'll also mess up certain hormones, especially insulin, which we become more resistant to(another quick recap of my previous posts: insulin picks up the food you ate and sticks it to your body. The more insulin there is, the more food will be picked up).

Every time you eat any sort of carbohydrates(which is pretty much every time you eat), insulin in released. The more carbohydrates you eat, the more insulin is released. The more often you eat, the more resistant you become to it. When you're too resistant to insulin, you've got diabetes.

Insulin also explains the so called starvation mode. It builds up when you're without food, then releases in massive amounts when you finally eat, and makes the most use out of food, sticking it all bellow your chin.

And from a biological standpoint, we HAVE to make the most out of the food we eat. Obtaining and digesting food is already energy demanding. Fat is nothing more than energy. Getting fat is like preparing for a long winter. Getting really fat means that you're winning. The more the better. We're energy dependent creatures. When we run out of it, it's game over for us. So our body makes sure it never runs out of supplies, and keeps them stacked high.

Unless there's no need for supplies in the first place.

Unless there's no winter.

Your body is the most sophisticated machine you'll ever come across. It will never sabotage itself. It is optimized in it's best possible way to cope with whatever it has to face, day by day. It's adopting constantly to the environment surrounding it. And it's only picking the strongest signals.

Eating all the time is a strong signal for sure, but I'm not exactly sure what it signals. Doing physically demanding tasks is also a strong signal, and is signals the creation of muscle, if it's consistent enough. Sitting for the most part of your day is another strong signal, and it will make you easier to sit and harder to stand by making your hips and your whole back stiffer.

So there's a lot of adaptation going on. And a lot of signaling.

And food(or more specifically, the timing of it) gives the most obvious signals of them all. And not in a "Here's some carbs and orange juice to start my day!" way, but more like "Here's food, you've earned it. Use it wisely."

Now's the time to work, then's the time to rest.

Our body likes simple, crude signals, and it responds well to them. It WANT'S to run on it's own supplies during the day, so it can regenerate and restock during the night.

A body that's used to be fed first thing in the morning and last thing before bed for I don't know how many years might require some convincing, but it sure is manageable.

As it seems, a third part of this series is about to come, since I've steered off course a little bit(again), as this is becoming a very long and hard-to-navigate(again) post. Once more, I'll be quoting Hippocrates, as he had it all figured out ages ago:

"Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in it's
work. The natural healing force within each one of us is
the greatest force in getting well. Our food should be our
medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when
you are sick is to feed your sickness."