Eating breakfast will help you burn 5 to 20 percent more calories throughout the day.

Eating breakfast will help you burn 5 to 20 percent more calories throughout the day.

Lose Weight: Eat Breakfast

Studies show making breakfast a daily habit can help you lose weight - and keep it off.

By Jeanie Lerche Davis

WebMD Feature

Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

What's for breakfast - coffee? Most mornings, we barely glance at the kitchen. Fixing breakfast takes up precious time that's in short supply. But there's ample evidence that the simple act of eating breakfast -- every day -- is a big part of losing weight, lots of weight.

"People skip breakfast thinking they're cutting calories, but by mid-morning and lunch, that person is starved," says Milton Stokes, RD, MPH, chief dietitian for St. Barnabas Hospital in New York City. "Breakfast skippers replace calories during the day with mindless nibbling, bingeing at lunch and dinner. They set themselves up for failure."

 

The Benefits of Breakfast

Eating breakfast is a daily habit for the "successful losers" who belong to The National Weight Control Registry. These people have maintained a 30-pound (or more) weight loss for at least a year, and some as long as six years.

"Most -- 78% -- reported eating breakfast every day, and almost 90% reported eating breakfast at least five days a week - which suggests that starting the day with breakfast is an important strategy to lose weight and keep it off," says James O. Hill, PhD, the Registry's co-founder and director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

Two studies in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association backed up this finding. Though they were funded by cereal companies, dietitians say they underscore the message - breakfast is important to weight loss.

A group of researchers analyzed data from a government-funded study that followed more than 2,000 young girls from ages 9 to 19. They found that regular cereal eaters had fewer weight problems than infrequent cereal eaters. Those who ate cereal occasionally had a 13% higher risk of being overweight compared to the regular cereal eaters.

Another research group analyzed government data on 4,200 adults. They found that regular breakfast eaters were more likely to exercise regularly. And women who ate breakfast regularly tended to eat fewer calories overall during the day. Those men and women who ate breakfast cereal had lower overall fat intake -- compared to those who ate other breakfast foods.

It makes sense: Eating early in the day keeps us from "starvation eating" later on. But it also jump-starts your metabolism, says Elisabetta Politi, RD, MPH, nutrition manager for the Duke Diet & Fitness Center at Duke University Medical School. "When you don't eat breakfast, you're actually fasting for 15 to 20 hours, so you're not producing the enzymes needed to metabolize fat to lose weight."

Among the people she counsels, breakfast eaters are usually those who have lost a significant amount of weight. They also exercise. "They say that before having breakfast regularly, they would eat most of their calories after 5 p.m.," Politi tells WebMD. "Now, they try to distribute calories throughout the day. It makes sense that the body wants to be fueled."

Source of Info: http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/lose-weight-eat-breakfast

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Eating breakfast can be a wonderful cornerstone to your diet or it can ruin it, depending on the type of breakfast you eat. Here are some facts about how eating your breakfast can help your weight loss plan.

 

Eating Breakfast Gives Your Metabolism a Boost

Maintaining a good metabolism is an important part of long term weight loss. After a night without eating, your body is in a mild fasting state, as it would be if no food was available. If you don't eat until lunch time, that can be up to 18 hours without food. For the entire morning, instead of working at peak rates and burning off more calories, your body will be trying to conserve everything it can. Eating a healthy breakfast will speed up your metabolism and make it work harder. You would be better off cutting calories by eating smaller lunch and dinner meals than by cutting out breakfast. In fact, studies following people who have lost weight and kept it off for more than a year show that 80 percent of them include breakfast in their eating plans.

 

Eating Breakfast Increases Energy Levels

Studies have shown that children who eat breakfast in the morning are less tired and irritable during the day, perform better on tests and have longer attention spans. The same holds true for adults. Eating breakfast will allow you to be more active during the day, increase your energy levels and give you more chances to burn calories. You're more likely to go for a run if you don't feel exhausted all day.

 

The Type of Breakfast is Important

The foods you eat at breakfast are very important for weight loss. The right kind can keep you satiated and energized for the whole morning, and make it less likely that you'll splurge on treats later on. The wrong kind can leave you feeling hungry sooner and cause peaks in blood sugar, or add unnecessary fat to your diet.

Lean protein is the best food choice for breakfast, particularly eggs. Low fat yogurt, ricotta cheese or lean ham are other good options. Fruit and whole grain toast or cereal, or oats are excellent food choices as well. Preferably your breakfast will be a combination of lean protein and complex carbohydrates, like boiled eggs on whole grain toast. This is a low fat, low GI (glycemic index) meal that will slowly release energy during the morning, rather than all at once, leaving you hungry again. Sugary cereals or white flour pancakes may leave you hungry again quickly, and high fat meals like fried eggs and bacon may cause you to gain weight from too many calories.

Eating a healthy, low fat and low GI breakfast is the best option when it comes to losing weight. Eating breakfast will help you to lose weight and is a much better choice than skipping the meal, which will leave you tired, and may cause you to overcompensate with forbidden foods later in the day.

Source of Info: http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/fitness/weight-loss/fact-or-fiction-eating-breakfast-can-help-you-lose-weight.html

Berries and Caffeine have been proven to increase a person’s focus.

Berries and Caffeine have been proven to increase a person’s focus.

Berries
Berries have some of the highest concentrations of antioxidants among fruit, and all berries are rich in healthy anthocyanins and flavonols (a subgroup of flavonoids), which may help protect against the breakdown of brain cells. Some encouraging animal studies have suggested that diets rich in flavonoids may help reverse memory loss in humans. 
 

Blueberries in particular have received a lot of attention because they are one of the best food sources of flavonoids. In fact, a British study revealed that eating plenty of blueberries can enhance spatial memory and learning. 
 
Fresh berries are available at farmers' markets, local supermarkets, and health food stores. During off-season months, frozen berries are a good substitute and just as nutritious.

Coffee
There's good news for coffee lovers: About two years ago, researchers from the University of Innsbruck in Austria found that caffeinated coffee can temporarily sharpen a person's focus and memory. After giving volunteers the caffeine equivalent of about two cups of coffee, they used magnetic resonance imaging to observe that the volunteers' brain activity was increased in two locations, one of which is involved in memory. Volunteers given no caffeine showed no increase in brain activity.

 

Another study, published in a leading neurology journal, found that the effects of caffeine may be longer lasting in women. This four-year-long study involved about 7,000 participants who all went through baseline evaluations for cognitive function and blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and other vascular issues.
 
The researchers reevaluated the participants at the end of two years and again at the end of four years; they found that women 65 and older who drank more than three cups of coffee per day (or the caffeine equivalent in tea) had about a third less decline in memory over that time than the women who drank one cup or less of coffee (or the caffeine equivalent in tea) per day. 
 
The results held up even after the researchers adjusted them to take into account other factors that could affect memory function, such as age, education, baseline cognitive function, depression, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, medications, and chronic illnesses. The researchers speculated that this caffeine-memory association was not observed in men because it's possible that the sexes metabolize caffeine differently.
 
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that unfiltered coffee (such as espresso, as well as coffee made in a French press) contains compounds that can raise cholesterol levels, especially in people who are already battling high cholesterol. To be safe, stick with filtered coffee, and of course, be moderate when adding milk and sugar!

Source of Info: http://www.joybauer.com/healthy-living/food-and-memory.aspx

Chicken Breast

Chicken Breast

 

Ingredients / Materials:

2 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup cilantro
2 tablespoons asian fish sauce or 1 tablespoon of GF soy sauce
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
Place all the ingredients above in a food processor and process until smooth.
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts

Preparation / Cooking Directions:

Pour marinade over chicken breast and let flavors sink in for 15 min in the refrigerator.

Prepare your grill or broiler. Cook until temperature registers 165F on the meat thermometer. Let the chicken breasts rest for 5 min before serving, this prevents the meat from drying up.

Old Fashioned Custard Pie

Old Fashioned Custard Pie

Ingredients / Materials:

1 unbaked pie shell
3 large eggs
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
2-2/3 cups of milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Preparation / Cooking Directions:

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. Beat your eggs slightly, then add sugar, salt, nutmeg, and milk. Beat well and poor into the unbaked pie shell. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Remove from oven and cool. Sprinkle the top of pie with fresh ground nutmeg and serve.
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Beautiful Macrographic Photos

Beautiful Macrographic Photos

Creativity with Food

Creativity with Food