Breakfast

Coming up with something to write about today is gonna be difficult: I wrote yesterday's item very late at night, then went to sleep, woke-up at about 10am this morning (yay for the weekend), had breakfast, watched the American Idol top 9 and the results show (yes I'm a fan, quit hating on me), and after a bit of cleaning-up around my place, have only 2 hours before I have to go to a birthday party which won't see me in-front of my computer to do any blogging for the day. So I have to come up with something now, and as you can see the number of things for me to draw upon is very slim.

Since I was talking about food in the last post, I might as well follow it up with more talk about food, which brings me to the topic I've chosen for today: breakfast.

Now in spite of hearing my friends go on about healthy food, one thing they often fail to get right, is breakfast. We've all heard the age-old saying about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. My parents drilled this fact into my head from a very young age, this country used to have an ad campaign about it in-case your own parents forgot to do the drilling, and whenever a report comes out that a statistically significant amount of children aren't eating breakfast before going to school, it makes headline news. So with all this talk about breakfast, I would've thought the advice had been heeded and is one of the things that every diet-talking person I know would follow and take to heart. But oh not so.

I most often used to hear my friends complain about crappy days because they missed breakfast during high school and university. Yet with both of those eras long behind us, the number of missing-breakfast-related complaints hasn't subsided.

Understandably, some of these people have demanding jobs with strict working hours that see them operate on the weekdays with minute amounts of sleep that have to be offset by popping back-alley pharmaceuticals. But others with the most flexible work-whenever-they-want-and-can-even-work-from-home hours still miss out. It's not as if they're being hypocritical of all the dieting advice they like to spout, but rather that they've mis-prioritized the advice and poor little breakfast has taken a back seat to sucking down omega fish oils or counting vegetables.

My own experiences with missing breakfast have always been bad, understandably, I feel CRAPPY for the entire day if I skip breakfast; I can't concentrate, my head aches, my stomach complains because it's schedule is all messed-up, and I'm much more likely to fall asleep at around the 2:30/3pm mark. Having skipped breakfast maybe once or twice during my university years was all the lessons I needed to remind me to never do that again. Nowadays, even if I'm running late for work, I will make a detour to the nearest McDonalds or Wholly Bagels and grab something from there before beginning my day. Everything else can wait; people rely on me to be focused when I do my work, and combating head and stomach pain while I'm comatose on my desk in the afternoon isn't going to help.