Avoid A Breakfast Blunder

Recently a reader asked for my opinion about a mind boggling dieting dilemma:

"Is it better, when faced with no other options, to skip breakfast or to eat something unhealthy?"

Well I was certainly stumped.

Everyone knows you shouldn't skip breakfast. It will make you too tired to face the day, and probably make you miss your scheduled workout. It will make you deliriously hungry later in the day, and likely to overindulge then anyway. But could it actually be better to scarf a Belgium waffle?

I turned to celebrity trainer Jarett Del Bene, who helped Lauren Conrad from "The Hills" slim down, for the answer.

"I would definitely eat a bad breakfast," Bene said with complete certainty.

I was shocked. "Even a Cinnamon roll?!" I asked incredulously.

"Yeah, definitely," said Bene.

He explained that when you first wake up in the morning, your body needs fuel. If you don't get it, you will burn muscle.

"If you don’t eat anything within an hour to a half hour of when you wake up, your body is burning muscle," said Bene. "Therefore when you do eat that breakfast four hours later, because your body was burning on your muscle and fueling on it, it’s going to get stored as fat."

But just because he thinks you can chow down on a calorie-laden croissant, doesn't mean Bene thinks you should go overboard.

"Definitely limit it," he said. "You just want to get something in your system to get your metabolism going."

So what does Bene's rocking bod eat for breakfast everyday?

"I eat oatmeal and six egg whites everyday," he told me. (Six whites, me too!)

And though you may not have the time to whip up something like that, doesn't mean you should reach for a donut because you're in a time crunch.

Bene recommends grabbing a bran muffin, blueberry muffin, or Subway's new healthy breakfast wraps with egg whites if you need a quick fix on the way to work. The Western w/ Cheese Breakfast Wrap is only 310 calories with 8 grams of fiber.

In our advanced society there really shouldn't be a need to have a "bad" breakfast.

But god forbid you find yourself stranded in sausage and grits middle America one desperate morning, now you know that a few bites to get you going is a better option than biting the bullet, starving, and binging later.

And hey, it's more fun to indulge a little anyway!

*Note: One time it is ok to skip breakfast first thing in the a.m., is if you're going to workout right away.

A new study by European researchers revealed that when athletes worked out on an empty stomach they burned more fat. This is because they weren't burning carbohydrates from a pre-exercise snack.