Lifestyle

4 ways skipping meals affect your brain and body

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Who hasn’t run out the door without having their first bite at breakfast, or powering away through work at lunch?


Sometimes, we are truly not hungry, but by skipping a meal, it could lead to a gateway of eating disorders like overeating or anorexia.

A steady supply of nutrients is vital for your body to function efficiently. Skipping a meal can affect your emotional and intellectual functioning.

Here’s how:

1. Brain turns into a mush

Skipping a single meal causes a variation in your sugar levels. Sugar, the primary fuel that your body runs on, takes a dramatic nosedive that affects the functioning of every organ, including the brain. The brain runs primarily on glucose, and lack of enough sugar in blood will affect your ability to think, concentrate and memorise. You become moody, irritable and foggy.

2. Metabolism slows down

The lack of available nutrients affects your metabolism rate. If you don’t provide enough food for your body on a regular basis, it will lose the ability to burn calories. At times, your body might crave for more, making your food intake out of control the next time you chow down leading to weight gain.

3. Storehouse of fat

The human body is prepared to survive every condition. Habitual skipping of meals will push the body to starvation mode inducing fat deposition. While in this mode, the body hangs on to the body fat and burns muscle tissues.

4. Hunger breath 

Starvation reduces saliva production resulting in dehydration of mouth. Saliva flushes out the bacteria in the mouth and with reduced cleaning action allows bacteria to grow resulting in bad breath.

 

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