I asked attendees how often they ate breakfast as part of a questionnaire.

Only 47.8% said every day (Darling, 2026).

That means more than half of those surveyed regularly started at least some mornings without eating. When I saw the result, I wasn’t entirely surprised. Skipping breakfast has become so normalized that it often doesn’t even feel like skipping a meal.

Maybe you woke up late. Maybe you weren’t hungry. Maybe practice started too early. Maybe you grabbed a coffee and decided you would eat later. Maybe you were trying to be “healthy.”

To be honest, the number didn’t totally surprise me, although it was still shocking. I have always been a huge believer in breakfast, but I can remember countless times when one friend would mention how hungry she was because she had not eaten all day, only for everyone else to agree that they had skipped breakfast too.

Those conversations made meal-skipping sound less like a warning sign and more like a completely normal part of being busy.

Whatever the reason, skipping breakfast removes one of the day’s easiest opportunities to fuel. Our day begins asking for energy before we give our bodies any.

As a disclaimer, eating breakfast will not automatically make someone a better athlete. Missing breakfast once will not destroy a season. And calling breakfast “the most important meal of the day” oversimplifies a much more important conversation.

What matters is whether an athlete consistently consumes enough energy and nutrients to support everything her body is being asked to do. Breakfast creates our first opportunity to do that.

By the time we wake up, we have already gone hours without eating. Then our lives become busy. We get ready for school or work. We concentrate. We manage stress. We lift. We practice. We compete. And for adolescent athletes, the body is also using energy to grow and develop.

Skipping breakfast does not remove any of those demands. It simply delays the arrival of important fuel. And for an athlete who is already struggling to eat enough, that delay matters.

Throughout my research on Low Energy Availability, I have focused heavily on the difference between the energy an athlete consumes and the energy her body uses.

Low Energy Availability, or LEA, occurs when there is not enough energy remaining after exercise to adequately support the body’s other physiological functions.

Over time, problematic LEA can affect menstrual function, bone health, recovery, metabolism, immunity, cardiovascular health, mental health, and athletic performance. It is the underlying cause of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, commonly known as RED-S (Logue et al., 2020).

My thesis focused on whether education could improve understanding of these conditions. Following the S.F.F. event, where I asked the question about breakfast, participants demonstrated statistically significant improvements in their understanding of LEA, RED-S, and the relationship between nutrition, physical health, and athletic performance (Darling, 2026).

But knowledge is only the beginning. The next question is whether we use that knowledge to change the small systems that shape our days.

Breakfast is one of those systems.

The issue is not that every athlete must eat an egg at exactly 7:00 a.m. The issue is that skipping breakfast can become the first major period of underfueling in a day already filled with energy demands.

Research on female athletes has introduced an important idea called within-day energy balance.

Instead of looking only at whether an athlete consumes enough energy over a full 24 hours, researchers examined how long athletes spent in an energy deficit throughout the day. Female endurance athletes with menstrual dysfunction spent more time in substantial within-day energy deficits than athletes with regular menstrual cycles, despite having similar estimated 24-hour energy availability (Fahrenholtz et al., 2018).

That study alone does not prove that skipping breakfast causes menstrual dysfunction. But it suggests something important. The body may experience a day of fueling differently depending on when energy arrives.

You cannot leave your body without enough fuel for hours and assume that a large dinner completely erases what happened earlier. Our bodies do not experience energy as a final number written at the bottom of the day. They experience every hour we ask them to perform without enough fuel.

This is where I think many athletes get stuck. We think that if we eventually eat enough at lunch or dinner, the morning does not matter. But think about what that asks the body to do.

If an athlete wakes after an overnight fast and skips breakfast, sits through classes, walks around school, and possibly completes a morning lift, she may have gone 14, 15, or even more hours without meaningful fuel by lunchtime. Then she is expected to fit all the energy she needs for health, growth, recovery, and performance into the remaining hours of the day.

Technically, she may try to make up for it. But in real life, making up for it can be incredibly difficult. Appetite, time, school, practice, homework, and sleep all create limits. There are only so many opportunities to eat. When we repeatedly remove one of them, we make adequate fueling harder before the day has even really begun.

This is especially important for adolescent athletes. They are not only fueling exercise. They are simultaneously fueling growth, development, school, recovery, and daily life.

Breakfast will not fix an entire day of underfueling. But removing breakfast makes an already difficult fueling equation even harder.

Fasted training is often presented as a shortcut to becoming leaner, more disciplined, or more metabolically efficient. But using more fat during a workout does not automatically mean performing better, adapting better, or becoming healthier.

Exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist Dr. Stacy Sims explains that most fasting research has been conducted on men and may not translate well to active women. She also explains that fasted exercise can decrease energy output and contribute to Low Energy Availability over time (Sims, 2025).

Research has also found that eating before exercise can improve prolonged aerobic performance, while skipping breakfast reduced resistance-training performance in people who regularly ate breakfast (Aird et al., 2018; Naharudin et al., 2019).

For young female athletes who are already fueling training, recovery, growth, hormonal function, school, and daily life, there is no reason to intentionally make adequate fueling harder.

This does not mean eating an enormous breakfast before a 5:30 a.m. practice. It means finding something that works, whether that is a banana, toast, applesauce, a granola bar, or part of a smoothie.

Difficulty and discipline are not the same thing. Discipline means choosing the behavior that supports long-term health and performance, even when skipping it would be easier.

When we talk about breakfast, we often focus on whether someone eats it. But what we eat matters too. For an athlete, breakfast is an opportunity to consume carbohydrates, protein, fluids, calcium, iron, and total energy before the day becomes busy.

Here’s a quick breakdown.

Carbohydrates help support high-intensity exercise and maintain carbohydrate availability for demanding training. Consuming carbohydrates before, during, and after appropriate sessions can help provide fuel for performance and replenish glycogen (Burke et al., 2011).

Carbohydrates certainly matter for endurance. That is why we see distance runners carb-loading before races or intense sessions. But that’s not the only reason.

Sprinting, jumping, lifting, and repeated high-intensity efforts all require readily available energy. A breakfast containing oatmeal, cereal, toast, fruit, a bagel, potatoes, or another carbohydrate source can help provide readily available energy for the work ahead.

Carbohydrates are not something an athlete needs to earn by completing the workout first. They help make the workout possible.

Breakfast is also an opportunity to distribute protein across the day instead of placing most of it at dinner.

In a controlled study of healthy adults, consuming a moderate amount of protein at breakfast, lunch, and dinner stimulated 24-hour muscle protein synthesis more effectively than consuming the same total amount of protein in a pattern heavily skewed toward dinner (Mamerow et al., 2014).

The study was not conducted specifically in adolescent female athletes, so it should not be treated as a perfect prescription for every reader. But it demonstrates why breakfast can be more than something that simply holds us over until lunch. It gives us one of several opportunities throughout the day to support muscle repair and adaptation, rather than asking dinner to carry most of the responsibility.

Most importantly, breakfast gives us another chance to eat enough. This sounds simple, but when the primary issue is insufficient energy intake, adding a reliable eating opportunity matters.

A skipped breakfast does not guarantee Low Energy Availability. LEA is more complicated than one meal, and it cannot be diagnosed from eating habits alone. But repeatedly skipping meals can make it harder to meet the high total energy needs of an athlete.

Long-standing LEA is associated with impaired reproductive function, compromised bone health, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular dysfunction, and reduced sporting performance (Logue et al., 2020).

This is why the conversation is bigger than breakfast. Breakfast is simply where the pattern often begins.

This is something I hear all the time.

Some athletes wake up extremely early. Some feel nauseous before morning training. Some have concerns about how eating affects their gut. Others have become so accustomed to skipping breakfast that morning hunger rarely appears.

The answer is not to force down an enormous plate of food and feel miserable. The answer is to reduce the barrier.

If eating a full meal feels difficult, begin with something smaller or easier to digest:

Liquid options can be useful when appetite is low. Preparing food the night before can help when time is the problem. Splitting breakfast into two smaller eating opportunities can help when a full meal feels overwhelming.

My breakfast routine is something I take very seriously, and I often allow myself more time in the morning to eat a full breakfast. When I have more time, I’ll have my Go-To Yogurt Bowl from Issue #004. My favorite way to change that up is by dipping some cottage-cheese waffles in the yogurt. Don’t knock it till you try it.

On days with a tighter time limit, making overnight oats the night before is the way to go. There are so many awesome recipes online, and they are ready to go without any morning preparation.

Instead of relying on motivation every morning, create three levels of breakfast.

Build a complete meal with carbohydrate + protein + color + fluid

Examples:

Choose something fast:

This does not have to be perfect, because it is already better than nothing.

Food tolerance is individual. Athletes with medical conditions, gastrointestinal symptoms, histories of disordered eating, or possible RED-S should work with a qualified physician and registered sports dietitian for individualized guidance.

Breakfast is not a cure for chronic underfueling.

An athlete can eat breakfast and still fail to consume enough energy throughout the day. She can also eat a “healthy” breakfast that is far too small for her needs.

A piece of fruit may be part of breakfast. It may not be enough to fuel a full school morning and hours of training. Coffee is not breakfast, although it is one of my favorite parts. A single rice cake is not automatically a performance meal. And “clean” does not mean it is enough.

The goal is not to eat the smallest breakfast that technically counts. The goal is to eat enough to support the life and training that follow it.

We tend to think the performance day begins at practice. It doesn’t. It begins when we wake up. It begins with whether we give the body fuel before asking it to think, move, learn, lift, sprint, and recover.

The breakfast you eat tomorrow morning probably will not feel transformative. It may just feel like toast, yogurt, cereal, eggs, oatmeal, a smoothie, or a banana eaten while running out the door.

But small decisions become patterns. Patterns become systems. And systems shape the athletes we become.

The discipline we need is not the ability to ignore hunger for longer. It is building a system that fuels us before hunger becomes an emergency.

A breakfast that is ready before you are.

Ingredients

Directions

Why It Works

The oats, banana, and milk provide carbohydrates to help fuel the morning. Greek yogurt, milk, peanut butter, and protein powder add protein.

The combination creates a more substantial breakfast than relying on coffee, fruit, or a bar alone.

For an early workout or a sensitive stomach, try a smaller portion before training and finish the rest afterward. I say “try” because I know I would probably eat the entire thing at once.

For the next seven days, eat something every morning.

Track five things:

This is not to prove that breakfast fixes everything, because that would be false advertising. The purpose is to stop treating the first fueling opportunity of the day as optional and notice what changes when your body has something to work with.

If you’re a coach:

Do not schedule early training and assume every athlete knows how to fuel for it. Keep a box of bars where your team trains, or carry a pack in your coaching bag. When possible, add shakes, overnight-oat packets, bananas, or other easy options. Fueling support does not have to be complicated to make a difference.

If you’re a parent:

Help make breakfast easier for a busy student-athlete. Keep quick options available, ask what foods sit well before training, and prepare something together the night before.

If you’re an athlete:

Do not confuse tolerating hunger with improving performance. Your body does not need to earn its first meal. It has already been working all night.

Now give it what it needs to become Stronger. Faster. Fueled.

Aird, T. P., Davies, R. W., & Carson, B. P. (2018). Effects of fasted vs. fed-state exercise on performance and post-exercise metabolism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 28(5), 1476–1493. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.13054

Burke, L. M., Hawley, J. A., Wong, S. H. S., & Jeukendrup, A. E. (2011). Carbohydrates for training and competition. Journal of Sports Sciences, 29(Suppl. 1), S17–S27. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2011.585473

Darling, S. R. (2026). Shifting the narrative on Relative Energy Deficiency and Low Energy Availability: The effect of an informational event on RED-S and LEA on understanding of optimal energy balance, nutrition, and training for female athletes [AP Statistics capstone thesis, Park City High School].

Fahrenholtz, I. L., Sjödin, A., Benardot, D., Tornberg, Å. B., Skouby, S., Faber, J., Sundgot-Borgen, J. K., & Melin, A. K. (2018). Within-day energy deficiency and reproductive function in female endurance athletes. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 28(3), 1139–1146. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.13030

Logue, D. M., Madigan, S. M., Melin, A., Delahunt, E., Heinen, M., Mc Donnell, S. J., & Corish, C. A. (2020). Low energy availability in athletes 2020: An updated narrative review of prevalence, risk, within-day energy balance, knowledge, and impact on sports performance. Nutrients, 12(3), 835. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12030835

Mamerow, M. M., Mettler, J. A., English, K. L., Casperson, S. L., Arentson-Lantz, E., Sheffield-Moore, M., Layman, D. K., & Paddon-Jones, D. (2014). Dietary protein distribution positively influences 24-hour muscle protein synthesis in healthy adults. The Journal of Nutrition, 144(6), 876–880. https://doi.org/10.3945/jn.113.185280

Naharudin, M. N. B., Yusof, A., Shaw, H., Stockton, M., Clayton, D. J., & James, L. J. (2019). Breakfast omission reduces subsequent resistance exercise performance. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 33(7), 1766–1772. https://doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0000000000003054

Sims, S. T. (2025, June 25). Why fasting doesn’t work for active women. Dr. Stacy Sims. https://www.drstacysims.com/newsletters/articles/posts/fasting-for-active-women-risks