Coffee is NOT Breakfast

Everyone says that breakfast is the most important meal of the day but no one truly understands why. Think about the word to begin with: you are breaking your fast after your sleep. Sleeping induces the metabolism to slow down in order to save energy and utilize the foods that are left in the digestive system to be saved. Everyone is supposed to eat with in a half hour of waking up. If you imagine the metabolism as a roaring fire, it begins in the morning as smoldering embers. When you leave the embers smoldering they will eventual go out, if there is too much piled on it at once it will eventually go out. It is necessary to start light and then continuously feed the fire to make it strong and burn anything and everything you put on it. A vital part of this fuel for the fire is water.

Some people say they normally don’t eat with in an hour or even two hours after they wake up and if they do eat the first answer automatically is “Well I have 2 cups of coffee.”
First off coffee is not eating and is not a substitute for water. Water is vital to every life function we have, water makes 55-75% of our total body weight and a little over 90% of our blood’s plasma fluid.

Coffee has caffeine in it (and yes even decaffeinated coffee has some levels of caffeine) which is a diuretic blocking specific hormones that help the kidneys hold fluids causing you to urinate more, in other words dehydrating you. As little as a 10% reduction in water can make you sick and only 20% of water reduction could lead to death. So when the kidneys don’t have enough water the liver then needs to work to help the kidneys perform their job meaning the liver is only doing half of it’s job. A function of the liver is to remove fats from the blood stream to be exerted, when the kidneys lose water the liver stops doing this efficiently and moves the fats(glucose) to storage. In other words not drinking enough water could make you fatter.

Now caffeine isn’t all bad, it has benefits such as it increases alertness, decreases reaction time and does have a fat burning capabilities but that is only if you are consuming more water then the caffeine is inhibiting your body to eliminate.

Everyone should consume AT LEAST 60-80 ounces of water a day; those who live active lifestyles should drink more. Imagine your blood as a highway made of red blood cells and white blood cells moving along a road made of plasma. The blood’s plasma is made of as said before mostly water, when there is a decrease in water in the body the blood becomes thicker and nutrients can not be moved around to specific parts where they are needed. When the highway of our blood becomes too crowded there becomes an over abundance of glucose in the blood stream which when reaches the liver gets turned into fat for storage. Now drinking more water and allowing more room on the highway aids the body in the proper distribution of glucose for energy. So when it comes down to it drinking water is the best diet pill you could take and not drinking water could lead you to gain weight. So when you wake up in the morning and reach for that first cup of coffee think about the reaction you are causing in your system. Poor yourself two large cups of water first and a piece of fruit before you begin to guzzle down your morning-joe, you may not only find that your caffeine crash later in the day is severely reduced but that your body will also thank you for it in the long run.

by:Ben Metli is associated with http://issa.com and has 2 certifications with http://scenichealth.com.  Thank you Ben for sharing.