Breakfast isn’t the most important meal of the day, but it might be your most important choice of the day. Will you continue what you have already begun well—setting the foundation for energy and health—or will you take this train straight off the rails? At breakfast, don’t just think about breaking the fast. Think about breaking the habit of fast breakfast. This means fast-metabolizing foods like sugar and bread are out, fats and ﬁber are in. You want foods that are slow and simple for your ﬁrst meal. And if you can’t ﬁnd them—if all you have is sugar and reﬁned carbohydrates—then skip breakfast altogether.

Getting Owned

How many times, and from how many people, have you heard the phrase “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”? I’ve heard it hundreds of times, and I’m pretty sure we have some Madison Avenue genius to thank for it. Unfortunately for Kellogg’s and General Mills, it’s just not true. Every meal is important. Yet as a culture we believe in breakfast at any cost, so it is the one meal where we fill ourselves with the most ridiculous shit possible. The typical American breakfast, for example, is usually some combination of refined carbohydrates and sugar made conveniently available to us, in bulk, on the run, at rock-bottom prices by the great people of the breakfast-industrial complex.

Walk down the breakfast aisle at the typical supermarket. Pop your head into the shops open for breakfast on your way to work or to school. What do you see? Nothing but cardboard and wax paper. Cardboard containers filled with “health” bars, colorful cereal niblets, sugary fruit juices, frozen waffles, toaster pastries. Wax paper filled with bagels, croissants, doughnuts (those amazing creations of human culinary ingenuity!), or, if you’re lucky, some white bread or a flour tortilla wrapped around a sad excuse for protein. Those are the options made accessible to the average American: fast foods filled with sugar and refined carbohydrates.

This is not breakfast. This is bullshit. It’s a blood sugar bomb. One that, when detonated, throws us entirely out of balance before we’ve even had a chance to set ourselves upon the day. Blood sugar is supposed to rise slowly after you eat a balanced meal full of fats, complex carbohydrates like fiber (the best kind of carbs), and protein, allowing time for the body to release just the right amount of a hormone called insulin to drop the blood sugar and help store the sugar as fuel. But when refined sugar or other simple carbohydrates push blood sugar up quickly, it is toxic to the cells and the body hurriedly floods the bloodstream with insulin, which craters our blood sugar levels, leaving us tired and irritable in the short term and at risk for a variety of health conditions in the long term.

This is not just some pesky personal problem we have to deal with on an individual basis. It can also have serious real-world ramifications. In a 2011 study of parole judges in Israel, researchers discovered that judges were significantly more likely to grant parole in the period immediately after breakfast and lunch, when blood sugar levels were rising, whereas a couple hours after a meal break, when those same levels were crashing, they almost never granted parole. It was like a real-world experiment where the hypothesis being tested was the tagline of that Snickers commercial: “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” The irritability and discomfort of the blood sugar drop, combined of course with the mental fatigue of the work itself, led judges to be far less compassionate. For better or worse, the scales of justice were balanced only so well as the blood sugar levels of the people holding them.

But I’m the last one to blame the judges, because I’ve been there. Before I found my way to the Jedi side of the nutritional force, I treated my digestive system like the Death Star trash compactor. In the morning I would reach for one of my favorite “breakfast” foods: cinnamon Pop-Tarts. POP-TARTS! Sugar filling, injected between two layers of refined starch (basically another form of sugar), and coated with frosting made from whipped powdered sugar. Where did I think the nutrition was coming from—the bready part? It wasn’t even bread! I would have been better off just eating the cardboard box the Pop-Tarts came in. At least that has fiber.

An hour after I popped the tart, the high from the blood sugar spike would reliably give way to the irritability, fogginess, twiredness (tired and wired), and hunger that comes with blood sugar collapse. And when that happens, what do we normally do? We step back into sugar’s BDSM dungeon with a ball gag full of carbs and pay to become its bitch for yet another day.

It is this inherently imbalanced relationship that has made sugar probably the worst thing to happen to human health in the last two hundred years. As consumption of our favorite sweet thang has increased over the decades, public health has deteriorated. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer have been linked to sugar and the associated blood sugar swings. The numbers speak for themselves. Thirty million Americans have diabetes. Cardiovascular disease is our leading cause of death. Childhood obesity is at epidemic levels, with one out of every five children clinically obese. Only 16 percent of women and 32 percent of men don’t ever worry about their weight. The great irony of all these statistics, of course, is that we have more gyms, diet coaches, juice bars, and “health food” restaurants than any place on the planet. By far. Yet despite constant worry and myriad options, we’re getting owned by our diet choices.

It’s hard to call it our fault, however. The fast, sugary foods making us fat and sick are perfectly engineered to trigger biological responses that are incredibly hard to resist. High-sugar foods release a massive hit of dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical reward for the brain, and as the pleasure monkeys we are, we are wired to seek it. Whether you want to call it an addiction or not, when you figure out how to release dopamine into your brain, you are going to have a hard time stopping. The same is true for sugar.

So let me stand up first. My name is Aubrey Marcus, and I’m a sugar addict. Everyone say, “Hi, Aubrey!” Even with everything I know now, living an existence dedicated to cultivating discipline and a balanced ethos, if you put a cinnamon Pop-Tart in front of me, I’d still want to eat the fuck out of it. I’d almost certainly take a few bites. The appeal is just that strong. Combine it with brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s implanting themselves as pillars of our culture, along with really bad—I mean really bad—nutrition information, and it feels like we never had a chance.

Thus, the first step in your nutrition plan is simple: no sugary stuff for breakfast. Period. Instead, we need to add fats back into our diet in sugar’s place. Yep, you heard me, fats. Fats fats fats fats. Get used to the word, because you are going to hear it a lot. Make this simple substitution—fat for sugar—and you will have the sustained, balanced energy to power you all the way up to lunch. And if you can’t find a way to make this happen, then skip breakfast entirely. Breakfast is not mandatory, and in fact you might just be better off without it altogether.

Owning It

Diets, diets everywhere, and not a bite to eat. That’s what it feels like when you look online at the landscape of diet plans and the commentary that surrounds them. Everyone, it seems, is promoting something different when it comes to nutrition: Paleo, keto, vegan, Atkins, fruitarian, Mediterranean, and countless others, each zealously claiming to be the “right diet” and the “one true way.” Well, let me clue you in on the best-kept secret in the health and nutrition industry: as far as diets go, all are a little bit right, and a little bit wrong, because a good diet depends entirely on the condition and purpose of the individual. If you have familial hypercholesterolemia, for example, you are genetically predisposed to need less fat. If you need fuel to survive in a postapocalyptic vampire world and come across some Skittles, then you need to unleash your inner Buffy the Vampire Slayer and taste that rainbow! So instead of arguing about which diet is superior, what we are going to do is focus on what I call universal nutrition principles, evidence-based guidelines that most people will flourish with. These will be spread throughout the other nutrition chapters (chapters 8 and 12), and together form a definitive dietary foundation for sustained energy, weight management, enhanced performance, and sexual appetite, regardless of where you are in the goal-setting process.

The first of these principles involves shelving sugar for the foreseeable future and making friends with fat. And if you can’t find the resources to get that done, then skip breakfast entirely and reap the benefits of intermittent fasting.

Universal Nutrition Principle #1: Sugar Will Fruc You Up

In 1822, according to Dr. Stephan Guyenet, people consumed on average the amount of sugar currently found in a single can of Coke or Sprite every five days. Today, we consume that amount every seven hours, with young males leading the way, consuming up to one hundred pounds of sugar per year! Our diabolical addiction to this sweet stuff has not only been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, as I mentioned before, but it has also been shown to degrade the skin and contribute to premature aging. There’s no need to sugarcoat it anymore: extreme sugar consumption is frucking us up.

But if sugar is making us fat, wrinkly, sick, and dead, how come we can’t stop eating it? One of the main problems is that often we don’t realize we are eating it. Sugar hides in everything. Often it’s labeled in confusing ways with innocuous names like “evaporated cane juice,” “brown rice syrup,” and “fruit juice concentrates.” In many places, advertisers promote high-sugar foods as “healthy.” I remember when I lived in Australia watching a commercial for Nestlé Milo, a cross between Yoo-hoo and Ovaltine, and seeing this sweet, chocolatey treat being sold as a type of sports drink for athletes! It’s not too dissimilar from how sugar-laden beverages like Mountain Dew and Gatorade are sold in the United States, by extreme athletes crushing them in the midst of doing something totally awesome. The worst is how we market to kids. Cartoon characters and colorful boxes are like the Pied Pipers leading kids to a life-time of sugar-induced metabolic disease. But those are the easiest sugar issues to combat, and it’s already begun worldwide, with bans on television advertising of sugary junk food targeted to children in countries including the UK, Canada, Mexico, and Norway. The good ol’ US of A? Not so much. We tried to self-regulate advertising to kids starting in 2006, but cartoons and Cocoa Puffs are still as friendly as green eggs and ham.

NOTHING IS SIMPLE WHEN IT COMES TO CARBS

There are two types of carbohydrates: simple and complex. What we usually call sugar is a simple carbohydrate. What we typically call carbohydrates, or starch, in the lexicon of diet books and nutrition programs, are complex carbohydrates. This isn’t because starchy carbs have commitment issues; rather it refers to their chemical bonds, which take longer to break down in the body. So carbohydrates like potatoes, rice, or quinoa are just a slower form of sugar, with a few more nutrients on board, than refined carbohydrates like simple sugar (aka candy cocaine), white bread, or that stuff that holds a Pop-Tart together. And slower is always better, since it gives your body a longer and more accurate window of time to respond to the glucose, or glycogen, that all sugars eventually metabolize into for the purpose of providing fuel to every living cell, including the brain.

A lot of people use sugar’s role as cellular fuel as a reason to say that sugar isn’t so bad after all. But our bodies are smarter than that. If we don’t have sugar in our diet, our body will get all Walter White and produce it. This is why even on an almost pure-fat diet like the ketogenic diet, the brain still has ample glucose to survive, but on a pure sugar diet, we’d turn into anxious, confused, irritable, obese, diabetic messes.

Remember, when sugar passes from the digestive tract, it enters the bloodstream, and blood sugar rises. Left alone, it becomes toxic, so as a response the body releases insulin, and the liver converts this sugar into fuel in the form of glycogen. But the liver can convert only so much before the glycogen stores become “full,” much as your mobile phone battery can’t store more energy than 100 percent of its capacity. So what does the liver do with the excess sugar? It converts it to fat, of course, which is the body’s secondary fuel storage system.

Deep Dive—Sugar Metabolism and Insulin Resistance

When the blood contains moderate amounts of sugar, and the body has ample time between releases of insulin, things work pretty well. However, when there is a constant level of sugar in the blood, or consistent spikes of blood sugar, not only does the liver convert sugar to fat, but the body has to release a commensurate level of insulin to keep up. Naturally, if there is a fast increase in blood glucose, there will be a fast increase in insulin. Often this leads to an overcorrection, as the body is in a hurry to drop blood sugar levels. This rapid increase then causes a swift drop in blood glucose concentrations, resulting in the “crash” we dread so much and, when you have too much often enough, a tolerance to insulin called insulin resistance. When the cells become insulin-resistant, they aren’t able to shuttle the sugar from the blood into the cells as efficiently, and so you aren’t able to remove it from the blood. At a certain point this becomes type 2 diabetes, and the injection of additional insulin becomes necessary to reduce blood sugar.

But let’s take a second to expand on that cell-phone-battery analogy, just to be crystal clear: The sugar power supply keeps flowing into your phone, representing your body, even after the glycogen battery is full. Since the battery can’t charge anymore, your phone stores the extra energy as a cushiony layer of fuel supply (fat) like a phone case. The longer you keep the sugar power supply flowing without draining the battery (exercising), the larger and wider the cushion around your phone becomes. Then, before you know it, your phone is on a reality show called My Six-Hundred-Pound Phone, and they have to cut a giant hole in the side of your house to get it out. I don’t care how much you want to be famous, that’s not the way to do it.

To be fair, there is a time and place for carbohydrates, but it isn’t breakfast. We’ll talk more about how to intelligently work carbohydrates and even a little bit of sugar into your diet later in the book. But for now, remember the D.A.R.E. campaign and just say no to the white powder, in all its forms.

Universal Nutrition Principle #2: Fat Is Your Friend

In 1980, when saturated fat was rising through the ranks toward public enemy number one, only 15 percent of Americans were obese. Today that number is 36 percent. All across the Western world, instead of improving heart disease and obesity, we’ve doubled and, in some cases, as in the UK, tripled it.

How did we get here? I don’t have enough fingers to point at all the people, organizations, institutions, and cultural forces responsible, but there was a pivotal moment in the latter third of the twentieth century when two influential men espoused radically different ideas about nutrition, and the wrong guy won. One man, Ancel Keys, vehemently believed that dietary fat caused heart disease, a theory that would eventually be known as the diet-heart hypothesis. The other, a scientist named John Yudkin, quietly understood that it was really sugar—pure, white, and deadly—that led to inflammation and obesity. The world chose Mr. Keys’s diet-heart hypothesis, and now the bloated consequences of that decision have created a public health holocaust: when we decided that dietary fat (and its associated cholesterol) was bad for your health, we started removing fat from our foods and replacing it with sugar and vegetable oils to make up for the flavor we’d lost in the removal process. That two-pronged dietary decision began the pincer movement that landed us in the clutches of the obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular epidemics we face today.

Placing blame is beside the point at this juncture, however; what is most important is continuing to do good science—work that, not surprisingly, continues to show just how wrong all those diet-heart guys really were. Work like the gigantic landmark meta-analysis in 2010 that, after a review of data from twenty-one studies that included 347,747 participants, found no evidence that saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease. In case you missed that, let me repeat—no evidence that saturated fat increases heart disease.

Or the research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006 that looked at 48,835 women who reduced their total fat intake to 20 percent of calories and increased consumption of fruits, vegetables, and grains in its place. If saturated fat was the problem, then surely replacing it with fruits, vegetables, and grains was the solution, right? Wrong. After more than eight years, the replacement of fat had not lessened the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, or cardiovascular disease.

Or the 1998 paper before that, from the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, that examined people in thirty-five countries around the world, looking for a direct link between dietary fats and cardiovascular disease. The conclusion: “The positive ecological correlations between national intakes of total fat and saturated fatty acids and cardiovascular mortality … were absent or negative.” In other words, people in nations with higher-fat diets were not dying of heart disease.

But we shouldn’t look at cardiovascular disease as the only endpoint for the science of fat. What was the quality of life of those eating more fats? William Castelli, the director of another study in Framingham, Massachusetts, that started in 1948 and is currently in its third generation of participants, has an answer: “We found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least and were the most physically active” (emphasis added). This is probably not what you grew up hearing. Nonetheless these findings have been confirmed by the recent resurgence of the ketogenic diet. A meta-analysis of over 1,200 subjects in multiple clinical trials has shown that the high-fat, very low-carb ketogenic diet helps you lose more weight than a low-fat diet.

To put it another way: if you don’t eat fat, you’re probably fat. This is a hard reality to accept for a lot of people. Because at a surface level it makes sense that something called fat in food would create fat in the body. Fat = fat, right? Wrong. You’ll want a lot more fat in your diet than you think, despite what all those diet-heart haters have had to say about things like saturated fat and its unfairly villainized companion, cholesterol.

Deep Dive: The Truth about “Good and Bad” Cholesterol

Cholesterol is a fatlike substance your body uses in its cells and tissues for, among many other things, the production of hormones like testosterone and estrogen, which are essential to maintaining good health and protecting against certain types of cancer and depression. To do that, cholesterol needs help getting transported into the body at the cellular level. It needs a ride, basically. Think of cholesterol as cargo and the cell as the port where it needs to be delivered. The best way to deliver it is by boat, a boat made of lipoproteins, which is what most people are referring to when they measure your cholesterol. This is where the confusion and misinformation around “good” and “bad” cholesterol begins.

In reality, there is only one type of cholesterol, and it is unequivocally good for you—it is the cargo on the boat. There are, however, different types of lipoproteins—different size boats—that deliver it into the cells. There are the “bad” small boats (VLDL, or very-low-density lipoproteins) and the “good” big boats (high-density lipoproteins and large low-density lipoproteins). The big boats carry the cargo efficiently into the cell without issue, and are correlated with great heart health. The small boats don’t carry as much cargo, so you need more of them, and they can get jammed up in the shipping channels (the arteries), causing all these little shipwrecks of lipoprotein and cholesterol lining your artery walls. Then, over time, pieces of the shipwrecks can get dislodged, travel to the heart, and lead to heart attacks or strokes.

What gives you more of these shipwrecking small VLDL particles? Let me tell you what doesn’t, first. Motherfucking egg yolks, that’s what. In a review of seventeen observational studies covering 263,938 total participants, no correlation was found between egg consumption and heart disease or stroke. Surprise, surprise, a lot of evidence points to sugar, particularly fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, as the culprit instead.

But not only was there no correlation between eggs and heart disease; eating saturated fat with associated cholesterol, like egg yolks, was actually found to increase the size of the boats, turning the dangerous small boats into larger, more benign boats and positively shifting the ratio of “good” to “bad” lipoproteins. In 1994 the official journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology reported that subjects who consumed diets high in fat (46 percent of calories), including a high saturated fat intake, increased the percentage of the larger particles (boats) of LDL cholesterol.

And yet many of the doctors who are prescribing you medication to lower your cholesterol don’t know this. A report by Credit Suisse in 2014 showed that 54 percent of doctors still believed that dietary cholesterol (like what is found in egg yolks) significantly correlated to elevated levels of bad cholesterol. It is a dangerous association that is just not true, a fact that was implicitly recognized as such less than two years later, when the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans did not specify an upper daily limit for dietary cholesterol, reversing a long-standing position. The body is smart; when you eat more cholesterol than your cells need, the body adjusts accordingly. What does that mean for you and me in practical dietary terms? Simple: whole-egg omelettes are back on the menu, baby!

WHAT FATS (BESIDES EGGS) SHOULD I EAT, THEN?

Not all fats are created equal. There are bad fats. Fried oils, refined fats, and trans fats—like you find in potato chips or margarine—drive inflammation and make you feel sluggish, and should be limited or avoided. (We’ll talk more about these antinutrients in chapter 8.) The good fats—saturated fats, cholesterol, triglycerides, and omegas of all sorts—are the ones found in unprocessed meats, dairy, fish, butter, egg yolks, olives, avocados, coconuts, and raw nuts, and should be sought out for breakfast. Here is a closer look at five of my all-time favorites that I regularly reach for at my first meal of the day:

WHOLE-FAT YOGURT

First of all, let’s get one thing clear. Nonfat dairy of any kind is bullshit. Dairy is comprised of largely three parts: protein (where whey protein comes from), sugar (lactose), and fats. The fats and the protein are the only good parts of dairy for an adult human. The lactose is not, because lactose is just another word for milk sugar. By cutting out the fat from dairy, you are basically saying that you want to increase the percentage of sugar relative to the other macronutrients. Great plan! That’s like saying you want to increase the amount of smog relative to your fresh air.

Fats make dairy taste good, and they make dairy good for us. There is a reason fat is a part of the milk that babies receive. We need it. If you look at the labels for nonfat yogurt, you will be shocked how much sugar is in there. It’s not healthy, or “lean,” it’s slow death in a cup.

Yogurt has a variety of additional benefits beyond its macronutrient value. Yogurt is cultured, meaning it contains some of the friendly bacteria that we have in our own gut biome. Several studies show that regular consumption of yogurt enhances the function and composition of microbiota, and may even improve lactose intolerance. A healthy gut biome supports mood and immune function and can even help battle pathogenic microorganisms.

Pro Tip: Coconut Yogurt for Millionaires

My favorite place to find new foods is a grocery chain called Erewhon, in So-Cal. One day while snack-hunting I saw a yogurt with a really shoddy label that looked like it was printed on a laser-jet printer from 1992. Super Coconut Probiotic Yogurt, it was called, and it boasted “240 billion organisms.” That caught my attention, but what also caught my attention was the price tag: $30 for the jar! Even for Erewhon, which regularly charges eighteen dollars for a smoothie, that was excessive. Out of sheer curiosity, I pulled the trigger anyway. Despite having extremely low sugar content, it tasted as if ice cream and coconuts had sex. After the first bite, I knew I had a dangerous new habit. And after a week of eating the stuff, I can honestly say I noticed a difference in my gut health. There are a few coconut yogurt brands, including the one from New Earth Superfoods, which I mentioned above, but the coconut cream under the Coconut Cult brand name will ship throughout the US in cold packs, so you can yogurt like a baller.

AVOCADO

Avocado may be the strongest argument against atheism I can come up with. It’s creamy, fatty, delicious, and comes in the perfect to-go packaging. It is packed with saturated fats and twenty other vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients. Not only that, it has fiber too. I like to eat half an avocado with lime, sea salt, and cayenne when I want a lush, nutrient-dense snack or a quick breakfast and I don’t have time to sit down to a proper meal.

BONE BROTH

Soup for breakfast? You’re damn right. It’s the perfect way to start your day. Bone broth may not be the miracle cure that everyone claims it to be, but it is damn good for you. When you cook it yourself, you will get a nice layer of fat that will rise to the top of the broth, full of all the vitamins and minerals from the marrow in the bones. It is an excellent carrier for a host of healthy spices, and is comprised of collagen protein, which has a unique amino acid profile, along with fats and a bunch of minerals. It contains no sugar and is one of the easiest foods to digest, making it the go-to for anyone trying to correct gut-related issues.

BACON

Bacon worship has gotten a little ridiculous. There are bacon museums, restaurants, candy bars, even bacon-themed art on Band-Aids! Part of the reason is due to the Paleo movement, which put bacon back on the plate of high-performance athletes. The other part of the reason is that fats are good for the body, including animal fats like bacon. As long as your bacon has not been pumped full of hormones or antibiotics or cured with artificial preservatives, those delicious slices of hog tummy are a fun way to get some fat and some protein on the plate. Just be sure not to burn the bacon (sorry, crispy bacon lovers), as the charring will add in some nasty antinutrients that we’ll talk more about in chapter 8.

BUTTER

When I was starting my own personal health journey, I was around a lot of people who couldn’t stop talking about butter. It was such an appealing concept, I decided I would try to eat butter at every single breakfast. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how best to do it. I knew I didn’t like how I felt when I had coffee first thing in the morning, so blending it with my coffee was out. Eating butter on its own is revolting unless you are a cute little child. So what did I do? I ordered foods that I was familiar with and I knew went well with butter. Specifically, pancakes. Lots of pancakes. Not for their own sake, of course, merely as a delivery mechanism for the butter (at least, that’s what I told myself). As for the maple syrup … well, who can resist maple syrup when you have a buttered pancake in front of you?

What started as a well-intentioned idea blossomed into exactly the blood-sugar-spiking nightmare we’ve been trying to avoid. This caveat aside, butter is great to work into your diet, including breakfast. Grass-fed butter, like Kerrygold, contains CLA, a potent nutrient with its own class of benefits, along with a great serving of saturated fat to fuel you into the day. Cook your scrambled eggs in it, blend it into tea or coffee, add it to your vegetables with a little sea salt. Syrup cakes aside, think of that old-school Reese’s commercial every time you look at good grass-fed butter: There’s no wrong way to eat it.

Without good fat in your diet, you are going to be setting yourself up for some serious problems—problems made all the worse when fats have gone AWOL during breakfast roll call, and sugar and refined carbohydrates have taken their place.

Universal Nutrition Principle #3: Skipping Is Better Than Cheating

Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. I don’t care how great the tale is you’re being told, or how old the wife is who is telling it to you. Most days I eat breakfast. But if I cannot gain access to good fats, and only have sugary shit and refined carbohydrates at my disposal … it’s an easy choice. I skip it. You’re going to be far better off skipping breakfast altogether and waiting until you can get a good lunch or a snack with actual nutrients involved, rather than eating a bunch of sugar.

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