I’ve never really been a big breakfast person. I also just have a hard time eating before dinnertime because by the time lunch rolls around my ADHD meds are in full affect, suppressing my appetite. Since my courses can get extremely demanding, and I’m often crunched for time, I had fallen into a bad habit of eating no breakfast, grabbing a quick lunch, and not eating a full meal until dinner at around 7pm. The reason I was doing this was because once my meds wear off, I crash pretty early in the afternoon, around 3-4pm. Doing any work after that is extremely difficult. So, I had been trying just to hunker down and work (with no breaks) until the sun was gone. It was exhausting.
I had thought that focusing was just getting harder as the day went on because my ADHD meds were becoming less effective. However, as we got further into the importance of glycolysis, GNG, TCA, and oxidative phosphorylation, and how they are all connected, I realized that the issue could be coming from a lack of fuel, or ATP.
In the morning, I have just finished fasting all night, so my body already has depleted the glycogen stores and is in need of energy. If I have limited access to glucose (from glycogen or from food), I make less pyruvate through glycolysis, less electron carriers through the TCA, and less ATP from oxidative phosphorylation, leading to exhaustion. I’ve started splitting the difference now and eating brunch (around 10-11am) so I can replenish my glycogen stores and have fuel for studying!
I can definitely understand the difficulty of having to choose between getting all your work done and making time to eat even though it is so important. All the case studies we discussed where patients had problems due to fasting during the night definitely solidified the importance of breakfast for me to help productivity!