In my most recent leftover, I gave some added insight into why I decided to reduce my coffee consumption. Today, I’d like to do a similar breakdown for why I resumed eating breakfast on certain select occasions.
This change is unlike most of the changes I make to my routines. Usually, I make a change because the evidence is clear that the change would directly benefit me. With breakfast, the evidence isn’t there, and the result is that my changes more resemble self-experimentation than they do self-improvement. To keep myself on track through such a change, I have to pay very close attention to my experience and analyze my decisions so that I’m attributing outcomes to the correct inputs.
The breakfast idea formed slowly in my mind over the past few years as I read about the various research and studies being conducted about fasting. There is nothing I would call conclusive about the field (and given how long humans live, there probably will not be in my lifetime) but from what I’ve read I feel pretty confident about the following conclusions.
First, our body reacts anytime we eat a meal. This is built up from understanding that the body reacts anytime we consume specific food or drink. We have a good understanding of how certain consumption leads to certain results – drinking excess alcohol leads to drunkenness (I confirmed this myself so no need to thank me, science), consuming an allergen leads to sickness, and so on. Our understanding of the details weakens as we think more broadly but I feel the same concept holds as we discard the specific for the general – our body changes after a meal.
Second, our body adjusts to what we eat. Again, this general conclusion is built up from widely held understandings from a daily level. A good example is how people who regularly consume too much caffeine or alcohol react physically when they suddenly go without while those who abstain experience no symptoms throughout a sober life. Again, though the specifics are important, I feel that the general idea holds up as we think about meals instead of foods and lifetime health instead of daily responses and reactions.
Third, an extended fasting period is like hitting the reset button on the body’s regulatory systems. Hunger is a good example here – it’s designed to remind us about eating but hunger’s behavior during a fast is a little counter-intuitive. Basically, it seems that hunger levels rise and fall during a fast, an observation that I feel violates the general understanding that hunger rises continually over time until it reaches (and remains) at a peak level. It’s almost like the body gives up on being fed and turns its attention to using resources in other ways, only to return later with a greater and more urgent sense of hunger.
The hunger example makes a point about the relationship between food consumption and our body’s systems – a lot of what happens inside us operates differently when we change what we put into our bodies. This is why I was intrigued a number of years ago when I read about research into the relationship between food consumption and jet lag. One specific method asked travelers to fast for twenty-four hours before breaking the fast with a meal eaten at 9AM local time on the day before departure to their eventual destination. The idea was that jet lag might be overcome if the body was used to having a fast broken with a breakfast that matched up to the rhythm of local time.
I’m not sure what the result of the study was but I thought the idea lined up really well with what I accepted about how my body worked. I’ve always found that eating certain foods near bedtime would prevent me from falling asleep and that not every meal consumed in the morning hours was treated equally by my digestive system. I’ve recognized how the patterns and routines of my life would trigger a sense of hunger when I walked past a certain place or realized the clock was at a certain hour and I’ve known that a force more powerful than the incessant beeps from my alarm controls my sleep cycle. In short, I feel safe concluding that what goes into the body influences a lot about how the body operates and therefore the idea that the timing of breakfast mattered in some yet unproven way about jetlag immediately captured my imagination.
These wild thoughts, theories, and inferences were wandering around somewhere in my memory banks when I heard someone compare staying up too late at night to giving yourself jetlag. The comparison clicked right away for me and I instantly realized that I could run a self-experiment by making sure to eat anytime I was forcing myself awake after a late bedtime. The results are inconclusive, of course, as such experimental findings are always going to be, but I’ve found that the early meal has coincided with an improved ability to wake up naturally at the same time the ensuing day.
The toughest part of this method has not been waking up to eat the first early meal – who doesn’t like a little breakfast? – but abstaining from eating breakfast when I do finally get back on my desired sleep cycle. I suppose it goes back to one of my initial comments – the body adjusts to what it eats, and does so quickly, and despite the best intentions of my intellect that brute collaborator known as my stomach does nothing to make my return to a regular eating and sleeping schedule an easy, enjoyable, or comfortable one.
