The weakest meal of your day

Here’s a number worth knowing: after 40, your muscle responds best when each meal carries about 25–35 grams of protein. Now audit yesterday’s breakfast. Toast and coffee is roughly 5. Cereal with milk, maybe 10.

That’s the quiet math behind midlife muscle loss — not dinner, which usually clears the bar, but the first meal of the day missing it by 20 grams, every day, for years.

Today’s move: put one real protein source into tomorrow’s breakfast. Three eggs (~18 g). A cup of Greek yogurt (~20 g). Cottage cheese on the toast you were having anyway (~14 g). Leftover chicken, if you’re unsentimental about breakfast foods — nobody’s checking.

You don’t need to redesign your diet this week. You need the first meal to stop being a rounding error.

— Sam