Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right? Wrong. As obesity levels continue to rise, this couldn’t be more of an inaccurate statement. So even if breakfast is the most important meal of the day, why are we grabbing a bowl of cereal (refined sugar) or poptarts for the road? Ideally, you’re sleeping 7-9 hours a night. That would mean by the time we get ready for bed and get ready in the morning we’re going at least 8-10 hours without eating. This sounds like a long time and we should be rushing to grab food.

The human body can go much longer without food than it can without water. After waking up, we should be focusing on hydration first. We lose water while we sleep via sweat and breathing. Instead of water, most of us head right for the Keurig to start our first cup of coffee. So we wake up dehydrated, then drink coffee, which makes us even more dehydrated. In Own the Day by Aubrey Marcus, he recommends drinking 12 oz of water mixed with Himalayan salt and a pinch of lemon. The salt helps us hold that water that our body is begging us for.

Even when people think of a healthy breakfast, it might include fruit, oatmeal, yogurt, etc. Even though these are much better than cereal and poptarts, these are still loaded with sugar. When we eat sugar first thing in the morning, our blood sugar spikes and releases insulin. The insulin allows glucose (what we use from sugar for energy) to enter our cells and give us some energy. The problem is for most of us who don’t have manual labor jobs, we don’t need that energy. That energy just gets stored for later as fat.

So what can we do? We have two options. To eat or not eat. If we are going to eat, it’s the perfect time to get some protein and healthy fats in. Food like whole eggs, bacon, avocados and grass-fed butter are great options. I personally skip breakfast and have a coffee mixed with MCT oil and (sometimes) grass fed butter. The healthy fats and protein give us sustained energy throughout the day, instead of that blood sugar spike, which will lead to us grabbing that extra cup of caffeine that we really don’t need. If you can’t eat breakfast, don’t sweat it. The human body is way smarter than we are and can handle not eating for a long period of time.

Action Items

*Wake up and drink water immediately

*Skip the sugar

*Healthy fats/protein or wait until lunch

References

https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/avoid-morning-glucose-spikes-4567.html

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hyperglycemia/symptoms-causes/syc-2037363

Own the Day, Own Your Life by Aubrey Marcus

During college, I played baseball at a small college in Pennsylvania. By senior year, I was closing in on the school record for hits. As I got closer to the record, I started to think about how cool it would be to be break it. All the hard work I put in would have finally paid off.

Then during the middle of the season, it happened. I got some high fives and shoutouts on social media. But a few days later, I was forgot about it and so did everyone else. I realized that the last few years I missed the whole reward of the goal I had set. When you focus so much on a goal, you miss all the work that goes into.

The journey for the record started six years before during my junior year of high school. I was playing for the JV baseball team, while all my friends were on varsity. I wasn’t even good enough to sit on the bench for the varsity team. That year changed my life. I started lifting weights and practicing extra whenever I could. The next year, I finally got my chance on varsity and recruited myself to the college I went. No coaches recruited me.

Breaking the school record didn’t mean much to me. What means the most to me is the journey it took me from JV to senior year. I became a much better player than I had any business being. I learned more about myself than I could have imagined. That’s the prize, not the baseball sitting in a case in my living room collecting dust.

During my freshman year of college, we had a guest speaker talk to the athletes. Gian Paul Gonzalez gave us each a poker chip, told us to write our initials on it, and taught us how to go all in. Just a few months before, he gave the same speech to the New York Giants before they won Super Bowl XLVI. Going all in is about letting go of the fear of failure and putting everything on the line to succeed.

I was fired up for a day or two, but never really thought about the poker chip after that. I did keep it in my book bag up until the day I graduated, though. Even though I had the chip, I have never gone all in. Up until this point in my life, I’ve played it safe. I picked the easy, comfortable route. I’ve only bet on the hands I knew I was going to win.

2019 is the year I go “all in.” Instead of taking the safe choice, I’m going to leap. I have no idea what the results are going to be. We are all capable of going all in. Is it going to be scary? Hell yes. I have goals for this year that I see and I think, “there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that.”

If you never go all in, you always have an excuse. You can say that you never really gave it your best effort. This year, I’m not making any more excuses and I encourage you to do the same. Let go of every doubt that creeps into your mind and do that thing that scares you. It will be worth it.

• 

Throughout the year, I’m going to review some great books that I read. There’s no better start than “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. I’ve read this all the way through three separate times. I’ll probably need to read it ten more times to get a true grasp on all the wisdom in this book. Eckhart Tolle has some views that might turn people away, but his ideas are truly profound.

Tolle’s message states, “there is a way out of suffering and into peace.”

The first topic he brings up is the ego. To me, the ego is the things we tell ourselves about who we are. The ego is constantly at work. We have millions of thoughts and inner dialogue throughout every waking moment. If you’re like me and most other people, almost all of these thoughts are negative. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Tolle says that’s not true. Our thoughts are not who we are. Take out the I think, and it just becomes I am. These negative thoughts and feelings we have about ourselves are not who we are. We must let go of them to truly our true self.

The pain body is an extension of the ego. Tolle believes the pain body becomes an extension of our physical body. People who constantly feed themselves negative thoughts and self talk physical body starts to become an extension of the pain body. Our physical body begins to lose touch with the difference between real events and our thoughts. Illness and disease can stem from this.

In my opinion, the most profound idea that Tolle has, is that to find who we truly are, we must stop searching. Everything we are and are meant to be is already inside of us. Once we realize that our ego and pain body is apart of us, but not who we are, we can become what we have been seeking all along.

It’s so difficult to put even one page of ideas from this book into a couple paragraphs. But I promise if you read this book, it will have a huge impact on the way you think about yourself.

Around this time, everyone is coming up with new year’s resolutions. Most people follow them for the first week or two of January, but then realizing how overwhelming it is to commit to something they’ve never done before. For me it will be no different. I’m committing to writing a weekly blog post for 2019. I’m not promising it’s going to be perfect. I’ll probably make spelling mistakes and ramble on about things that don’t make sense. In life, so many people wait for the perfect time to do everything. Guess what? The perfect time is never going to come, so start today.

So who am I anyway? My name is Angelo and I am from Pennsylvania. I’m twenty-four years old and don’t really know what I want to do with my life. Up until this point of my life, I’ve been a taker. I’ve spent so much time reading books and listening to podcasts from people much smarter than me. But all this time, I’ve never given of anything of value back to the universe. This year, I want to settle the score and give back.

It’s uncomfortable to try something having no idea what the outcome is going to be. Saying to do this for 2019 out loud has been scary. But all great things come from people who weren’t afraid to fail. Part of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous man in the arena quote says, “the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs; who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” I have a resolution to move from the stands onto the playing field. Let’s see where this goes.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton