I wanted to tell the principal he was full of it.

In January of 1984, I was hired as the second-semester substitute for the English chairperson at Oley Valley High School who needed a medical sabbatical. Since a chairperson often determines which teacher teaches which course, the schedule I inherited hers was filled with the best ones, upper level courses filled with college-bound kids.When the principal welcomed me, he stressed that college-bound kids were already highly motivated and that they didn't need any extra motivation from me. What they needed from me quite simply was not to do anything that could possibly change that.In essence, to leave well enough alone.Who was I to argue? I was a half year away from a rather rude awakening landing a full-time job.Instead of interpreting British literature with the creme de la creme in a moneyed community, I'd be teaching the intricacies of English grammar to every single eighth grader in a wounded but proud little town trying to find its way as its main tax source and largest employer incrementally imploded.The principal was a half year away from becoming the school's superintendent.Yet despite the disparity in our experience, I knew that in this particular instance the principal was wrong.I wanted to quote Browning "Man's reach should exceed his grasp or what is there a heaven for?" for isn't it a teacher's job to engender an attitude in students that makes them want to strive for more than they already know?I share this story because too many people take that principal's philosophy about teaching college-bound kids when it comes to their fitness and health.They're not looking to improve both as much as keep the status quo.But proof abounds that you should not leave well enough alone, that you should always be on the lookout for little ways to enhance your health. Such as, better ways to moderate your blood glucose level.The times of your meals, the frequency of your meals, and the composition of your meals the percentages of protein, carbohydrate, and fat should create a relatively stable blood sugar level throughout the day.Create too low a level often by skipping a meal altogether and simple tasks take on an added degree of difficulty. Concentration suffers. Hunger dominates.Yet eat the wrong things because of that hunger, and you don't eliminate the problem as much as produce another.Now your blood glucose level increases so quickly that the body produces extra insulin.That extra lowers your blood glucose level even lower than it would be after fasting for three hours, so sometimes you feel hungrier than you do when you skip a meal.Eat the same wrong things again and you don't stop the hunger. You start a cycle where you always feel hungry yet you keep gaining body fat.Recent research, however, has found a crucial element to stabilizing blood glucose levels throughout the day, and it's a simple strategy that your mother probably stressed to you.Eat a good breakfast.Daily.University of Missouri researchers created two groups from 35 overweight young women by whether they normally skip breakfast or eat one high in carbohydrates.For three days, they then had the skips-breakfast group either eat a high-carb or high-protein breakfast or continue to skip it. The high-carb breakfast group either continued to eat a high-carb breakfast or consumed a high-protein one for four days.Tests were conducted before and after, and what surprised the researchers was that the high-protein breakfast didn't really help to moderate the blood glucose of the skips-breakfast group as much as the high-carb group. In fact, the breakfast skippers actually experienced poorer blood glucose control after a high-protein breakfast as compared to eating no breakfast at all.The group that normally ate a high-carb breakfast, however, experienced what the researchers expected: greater sustained blood glucose control when they switched from a high-carb breakfast to a high-protein one.What are you to make of this? Heather Leidy, an assistant professor in the University of Missouri Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology explained it this way in a Medical News Today article: "These findings may indicate an increased inability among habitual breakfast skippers to metabolize a large quantity of protein."In other words, it's not that the so-called "good" breakfast high in protein hurts them; it's that the period of skipping breakfast totally is what has created the hurt.While the researchers aren't sure how long a breakfast skipper needs to eat a high-protein breakfast for it to do what it normally does and moderate blood glucose throughout the day, Leidy and her cohorts remain confident that if breakfast skippers continue to eat a breakfast of about 350 calories with about 120 of those calories (30 grams) coming from protein, their blood glucose levels will eventually stabilize throughout the day in the same manner as the studied high-carb breakfast group.And that stability increases the odds of something happening that you probably want: control of whether you lose or gain weight.