The Hunger Games
People everywhere are still a-buzz about the movie series The Hunger Games; based on the best-selling novel trilogy by the same name (If you have teenagers in your home I’m sure you know all about it.) The other morning I was thinking about the book/movie’s title while I was eating breakfast. I laughed to myself because it dawned on me that there was nothing new about “the hunger games”—people have been playing that game for decades.
Obviously if you want to lose weight you need to cut down on calorie intake. So it seems intuitive that if you could skip an entire meal—say, breakfast—then even better. Think of all those calories that would never get to pass from your lips to take up residency on your hips! Unfortunately, meal skipping can have the reverse effect on weight loss.
Your metabolism can be likened to a campfire. At night, while you sleep (and fast), your metabolic “fire” burns way down until all that’s left is “glowing embers”. In the morning, you were designed to begin to stir up those embers by breaking your nighttime fast with break-fast. By fueling your body early in the day, you place “kindling”, if you will, on those hot embers enabling your daily metabolic fire to roar back to life. With a food-stoked metabolic fire ablaze, subsequent meals and snacks can be readily burned.
However, if you (with good intentions) skip breakfast in lieu of some later-in-the-day fueling, it is similar to placing full-sized logs on top of glowing embers—the burn potential is poor. If your body thinks it’s in starvation mode (brought to you by your own sort of Hunger Games) then it has more of a tendency to store ingested calories away as fat for suspected “calorie emergencies”—which of course, never come.
The best way not to play a part in your own Hunger Games is to eat three nutritionally sound meals and two small, blood sugar stabilizing snacks each day. Lose weight by eating more…now that could be a best-selling book title!