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Comment by DaiHafVaho | Hacker News Reader

The easy: Drink more water. Stretch regularly.

The habits to change: Eat breakfast. Cherish loved ones.

The difficult: Empathize with your employer; understand how they (don't) value you. Contemplate the evanescence of your work; it will all someday fade away, and you must come to terms with this fact.

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It's surprising to me that so many people recommend eating breakfast. There's no specific value add to eating early in the morning. There are tons of value adds to constraining the hours you eat during each day ("intermittent fasting"). Eat breakfast at your own risk:

https://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-skipping-breakfast-b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_breakfast

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680567/

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-sur...

Your other points are solid. I'd add regular exercise as well.

If you exercise first thing in the morning (like myself), I'd say breakfast is essential shortly afterward.

I exercise shortly after getting up 5 days a week. I don't eat food until hours later.

Depending on your exercise goals, you may want to eat before or after exercise but it certainly isn't essential.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/eating-before-or-after-...

Eh, for retaining muscle density & mass I'll defer to sports medicine tradition and what I learned from trained coaches there—

Healthline also posts articles saying it's important to eat right after exercise, so I gather they aren't speaking unilaterally in either case:

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/eat-after-workout

Yea, I'm not trying to argue that eating right after exercise is not important. I just don't believe it's essential. Your body will use nutrients from the post-workout meal to help rebuild muscle and help your body recover so it's highly recommended. If muscle mass and density is a top priority than you may consider it essential for sure.

I lost over 100 pounds by reducing carbs and skipping breakfast. And I hardly miss it at all.

Depends what you are looking to get out of it, I never used to eat breakfast, maybe I was always just unsatisfied with it, but in a way I was unwittenly doing intermittent fasting. It certainly helped me maintain a healthy weight and I'm seemingly healthy by all metrics but for those that need the nutritional benefits to start an early morning and just feel good about getting up in the morning that's the real benefit when you have a routine to stick to.

Having a schedule and routine is massively important and can outweigh the benefits/detriments of other choices like whether or not you eat breakfast.

If you are going to eat breakfast, be wary of the stuff that's marketed as breakfast foods and cook with real ingredients.

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