Aging is a beautiful—but admittedly hard—part of life. While you may not be able to control the rate at which the effects of aging impact your looks and appearance, how and when you fuel your body with food can help you move and feel as if you’re younger than the actual age written on your birth certificate. This can start with your first meal of the day: breakfast.
“Many of us obsess over how we age on the outside—with concerns about wrinkles on our faces, bags under our eyes, and our hair streaked with gray. But it’s healthy aging from the inside that we should focus our energy on,” explains Bonnie Taub-Dix, RDN, author of Read It Before You Eat It: Taking You From Label to Table, and the creator of BetterThanDieting.com.
Although you can’t push back your biological clock, Taub-Dix notes that you can help to slow the aging process down by taking a closer look at what you put inside your body instead of only focusing on the exterior.
“If you have a car and you fill its tank with premium gas, keep it clean, do oil changes when they are due, change the filters when necessary, do your wheel rotations and alignments, you will have a mint car that will last you a longer time. It’s the same with our bodies,” says Sandra Arévalo, MPH, RDN, CDN, CLC, CDCES, FADA, and national spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “If we treat it the right way, feeding it with the right nutrients, we will keep it healthier and younger longer.”
The best news? You can start implementing quality breakfast habits to help deter the physical repercussions of aging at any point—even today! To help get you started making healthier eating choices able to preserve your youthful vibrancy, we asked a couple of dietitians to weigh in with their thoughts on the best breakfast habits to slow down the aging process.
1
Eat breakfast—don’t skip it!
One of the easiest habits you can implement to delay signs of aging is simply not skipping breakfast. Instead, prioritize eating this important meal each and every morning to get your metabolism going.
“Eating some breakfast is often more important than what you eat for breakfast,” explains Arévalo. “Big or small, there are peer-reviewed studies that indicate that eating earlier in the day helps to improve your cardiometabolism. This means that you will have a healthier heart, prevent diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, and even lose weight. The better you feel, the younger you are.”
