02/02/10: Working through blogs

I'm working my way through various blogs at the moment and the blog du jour is Catherine55.  I've got a couple years worth to catch up and she is well worth the read, from where I'm sitting.

I just read a blog of hers from January of 2009.  "Skinny Girl Secrets".  WOW!  I started to leave a comment and then decided I was just too late for such things.  So instead, I'm telling you about it and creating my own blog to boot.

In a nutshell, the "Skinny Girl Secrets" blog says that breakfast may not be necessary afterall.

Now onto my thoughts. 

YAY!

I am a firm believer in "don't eat unless you are hungry" and generally speaking, I do well with that.  I hate breakfast for two reasons.  1) if I eat anything before 10 am, I will feel sick all day.  A smoothie is the one thing I've found that doesn't screw me up.  2) I'm never hungry before 10am and sometimes not even until 12.

I don't hate breakfast foods.  I hate food first thing in the day.  And I hate it because my body hates it.

I've posted this before but I'm going to talk about it again.  As a kid my mom tried and tried and tried to get me to eat breakfast.  She felt guilty for sending me off to school without a meal in my belly.  And I refused and refused and refused to eat it.  On the rare days I gave in and she "won", the school would call around 10:30 am saying I was sick and she needed to come get me.  Around about the time I was 7-ish, she quit fighting me.  And the school quit calling.  She said that as a baby, a little itty bitty baby, I would not take a anything before 11.  She could not get me to put anything in my mouth.  But science said I had to have something so she tried relentlessly.

Turns out science didn't know what was best for my body.  I am seeing articles online (you've got to search hard because they are hidden) that say the experiments about the necessity for breakfast have all been endorsed/sponsored by corporations that sell mostly breakfast foods.  They have a stake in the answer - and who ever woulda thunk it - science is skewed.  Nooo...that never happens....

If you eat something when you don't really want something (like me with my smoothie, much as I love it, it's true) then that's just extra calories.  Our metabolism is related to our circadian rhythm's.  That circadian rhythm literally sits there and reads our cells.  When the cells are active - we feel energetic and good - an up cycle.  When the cells slow down, we feel tired or hungry - a down cycle.  Sometimes food helps that, sometimes sleep helps that.  Our cells even tell us which is which, whether we need sleep or food.  But if you put food in when you body isn't asking for it, it's going to get stored until later.  But later, when your cells say "food please", you eat again...so now you've just created a surplus of energy - which then gets stored as fat.

This is so inherently common sense - but science wants to say otherwise.  Science is a funny funny thing. 

The interesting thing to me is that I know my circadian rhythm says that I prefer to stay awake later at night and to sleep a little longer during the day.  Science has never been able to figure out what sets our rhythm's but it's very personal and while it is influenced by geography and ambient factors, mine can be quite different than the guy I sleep beside.  My circadian rhythm wants me to get up around 11am.  By 11am, I'm hungry.  Interesting.  Now, life dictates that I can't always listen to that rhythm, of course.  But...here in my great company we had to attend a safety course upon being hired.  We learned how to drive a car.  Seriously, we took trucks and cars out on skid pads and learned how to control a skid and we purposefully drove cars into ditches so that we could learn to do this safely.  In addition to all of that, we learned about our circadian rhythms and how that affects our abiltity to do our job, as well as to live our lives.  We also spent some time with "drunk goggles" which also simulate being exhausted.  That was interesting because those goggles simulate drunk to 0.08 for a 6'0" tall man of average build.  I'm not a 6'0" tall man with average build so those goggles very quickly actually made me feel like I was about to get sick if I didn't take them off right that very instant.  Anywho, an interesting class that lasted about 2 weeks.  Back to life dictating...when I worked offshore I might very well end up working nights - midnight to noon.  Sometimes I had a cabin in the interior of the ship and did not have to battle sunlight.  Sometimes I did not.  And sometimes I worked days - noon to midnight.  Either schedule screws with you - but noon to midnight was incredibly natural for me.  Never needed an alarm clock.  Worked out exactly when my body was most interested in doing so.  Wasn't exhausted at the end of the shift, was ready to play, actually.  It was great.  But the opposite shift - something opposite what my body wanted to do, took adjusting.  And even when I felt adjusted, I still couldn't figure out how to eat at the right times because I was quite simply not hungry during those hours.  On the natural schedule - I always lost weight.  On the unnatural one - I always gained weight, even when only eating 500 calories a day.  I was eating when I wasn't hungry.

So simple.  So inherent.  And yet we fight this.  Interesting.

And breakfast ties to that.  Interesting.  I know of other people like me who are just not interested in food before a certain hour of the day.  I think there are more of us than not, actually.  And the one thing I can say is on weekends, when I do get to sleep late, I generally don't bother with eating a first meal.  And on Monday's the scale usually is down a pound or two...even though I might not have been great about the other two meals.

So like the original blogger, I'm going to play with this and see what happens.  I know the smoothies still have to get made - because my sweet hubby does want breakfast first thing in the morning.  But that doesn't have to mean I have to drink 'em first thing in the morning.

One final thought...at the end of the day, science can't tell us what's best for our bodies.  For example, my ambient body temperature is quite low.  So low that when I'm sick, I have a temp of 98.6...although, not in danger as danger doesn't start until >100.  I also have an unbelievably low blood pressure.  So low that at one point I was told I should be dead it was so low (55/40)...but I was fine.  (Not normally that low, but even in that case, there was nothing wrong with me and I felt fine.)  Science says that certain things, statistics, mean something.  But all a statistic is is a comparison between you and me.  And sometimes our bodies are just different.  Some people need breakfast...and some people do not.  So there's some food for thought...

PS (added 02/03/10): please feel free to comment on this blog no matter how long it's been since this was posted.  I would love to hear what people think about this, personally and otherwise!