Breakfast of Champions
Do you eat a healthy and well-balanced breakfast? Many doctors and nutritionists consider breakfast to be the most important meal of the day because it breaks the overnight fasting period and replenishes your body with essential nutrients to give you energy throughout the day. What you eat, or don’t eat, for breakfast often affects what and how much you eat the rest of the day.
A little trivia – do you know why it is called breakfast? The word breakfast literally means “breaks the fast” that occurred during your period of sleep.
Are you the least bit curious as to why the noontime meal in called lunch? Lunch is a relatively new concept, and it is an abbreviation of the word “luncheon,” which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) word nunchin, meaning “noon drink.”
Okay, your interest is piqued, so how about the origin of supper, or it is dinner? During the 18th and 19th centuries when society was primarily an agrarian (agricultural) society, the main meal, called dinner (“to dine”) was eaten at midday, which would give the farmers a boost of energy for the afternoon. A smaller evening meal, called supper, meaning “to sup,” often consisted of light soup that had cooked throughout the day. As societal norms changed, and as people began working away from home or the farm, it became hard to have the main meal at midday, so a smaller meal became the norm for midday and the main meal shifted to the evening.
At our house a typical weekday breakfast consists of cereal and fresh fruit with soy milk or a bagel with cream cheese, banana, water, hot tea or coffee. Just as eating a healthy breakfast fuels your body up for the day, spending time with God each morning is also critical to fueling up your soul for the day. In Psalm 5:3 we read, “In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and expectantly wait.”
Elsewhere in Psalms we find these words – “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days” (Psalm 90:14). To my knowledge, this is the only psalm uniquely attributed to Moses. Jesus knew the importance of spending time alone with God in the morning – “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35).
So, today I ask – Are you starting your day off on a good note, eating healthy and spending time with God? To borrow the tagline from the General Mills cereal Wheaties, now that is “The Breakfast of Champions.”
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