What is the Most Important Meal of the Day? Every meal!

Since we were kids, people always ask the pertinent question "What is the most important meal of the day?" and more often than not, people say breakfast. Now a days some other people say you're post-workout meal, or even your pre-workout meal, which is all good and dandy, but why can't we just say EVERY MEAL IS THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL.

Everyone knows by now that diet is just as, if not more, important to a person's body than daily exercise is, but why have we always been told one meal is more important than another? You are what you eat, so why are we told to be important in the morning, but not at night? Proper nutrition throughout the day is important to everyone, no matter what their goals are in the gym.

To break it down a little more, breakfast is a very important meal, it jump-starts your day and keeps you going until the late hours of the evening. Breakfast can be your most abundant meal, because you have all day to burn off whatever it is you ate.

Pending on when you workout, let's say your next meal is your "pre-workout" meal, about an hour and a half before you hit the gym, late morning, early afternoon. Your car needs gas to run, and so do you. What you put in your body before you hit the weights or go running is the fuel that you need to maintain your workout and get the necessary energy to complete that last rep.

The next meal, fate would have it, is the "post-workout" meal, and I believe most "guys" shoot right back to their room and chug down a protein-shake, which is great, but you should also add some carbohydrates to that meal, because getting half of your daily amount of protein in one drink that goes down in 2 minutes isn't necessarily what is recommended.

Pending on your schedule, once again, let's say it's late afternoon now and you're going in for dinner. I believe dinner should not be a huge meal because, you're probably, or should be, going to bed in a few hours or so, and having all the food in your stomach over night just kind of stores itself, and no one wants that. But you should absolutely be getting your vegetables and some complex carbohydrates in this meal so you don't reach for that late night pizza run at 11 at night.

I'm a believer that it's not too too bad to eat a small amount late at night, maybe have some peanuts, or trail mix, something light, not too over the top to maintain your body and repair your muscles over night. If the "guys" want to break up their massive protein shake into two parts, this is a great time to have part two, because when you sleep you repair the most muscle.

Now I am certainly no nutrition expert, nor do I claim to be, but I totally believe that every meal is just as important as the other. Include a multi-vitamin, maybe some extra Omega-3 in the form of a Fish Oil capsule, if you don't get as much as you could have, and you're all set to go.

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/bodybuilders_most_important_meal.htm