This topic seems to be coming up every.day in my house, so I wanted to dive more deeply into it.
Before I talk about a few of my favorite breakfast ideas, I want to talk about the reason why breakfast is so important. Starting the day with the right nutrition is as essential because it improves everything from your mood to a better mental function to weight loss and healthy blood glucose levels. Skipping breakfast can result in large fluctuations in blood glucose throughout the day, which will show up by having an increased appetite. Studies suggest that my people would end up overeating for the rest of the day due to letting their blood glucose get too low. Eating breakfast is consistently linked to better weight management in studies for this very reason.
Mornings fuel us for the whole day, our bodies need energy after a long night of reset, plus this is when we set ourselves up for the day in general. So by having a morning routine, including a nourishing breakfast in our daily ritual, will set us up to start the day right.
Let's talk about what is it that we should NOT be having for breakfast, and I am going to quote one of. my favorite functional medicine doctors, Dr Mark Hyman. According to him "if it seems too good to be true... it probably is. Many foods that traditionally are considered to be breakfast foods according to the SAD ( Standard American Diet) are really desserts." He continues by saying: "you would never eat ice cream for breakfast, but many cereals, toaster concoctions, muffins, and other things that pass as breakfast – even ‘healthy’ choices – contain as much if not more sugar”. And consuming this much sugar first thing in the morning has devastating effects on the rest of your day.
“When you start your day with sugar, you kick off an addictive cycle of sugar and carb cravings that will last all day long,” Dr Hyman writes in his book.
Some examples of bed breakfast ideas?
Fresh pressed juice. The fresh-pressed juicing trend reached astronomical heights back in 2016, when, Forbes reported, it became a $3.4 billion industry. While a juice can be a great way to get tons of vitamins and minerals into your diet, they can also be packed with lots of sugar, especially if you make your juice from mostly fruits. I suggest starting your day with a full glass of warm lemon water. This will open your digestion, wake your body up and hydrate you first thing in the morning.
Other bed ideas are: breakfast muffins, cereal, pancakes, waffles, french toast, fruit smoothie, banana bread. Although some may seem like a fast and easy breakfast for the busy mornings, they are all packed with sugar and non-healthy nutrients.
Skipping breakfast is not a good idea, especially if you have a long busy day ahead of you. Some people decide to do this because they want to practice intermittent fasting, which is a great way to optimize your health, and it’s more approachable than you might think. It is a free tool that activates all the systems in your body to protect you, heal you, and help you live longer. Fasting can help to reduce inflammation, brain fog, and insulin resistance, it increases energy and bone density and activates autophagy, which is the process of cleaning out damaged cells. While this describes intermittent fasting in a nutshell, since this is another topic all-together, I will say this: if you have dinner early in the night and have at least 12 hours before you have breakfast, you give your body enough time to do the rest and repairs that it needs to do. BUT if you really don't have time for a healthy breakfast, it's probably better to skip it entirely than load up on sugary junk.
Here are some of my favorite suggestions for a healthy breakfast:
Scrambled eggs with greens and herbs
Gluten free oats with nuts, seeds and berries
Avocado toast on a good quality bread with a side of tomatoes
Poached eggs with or without a good quality bread alongside some healthy sautéed greens
Good quality bread toasted and served with liver pate and bell peppers or tomatoes
Last night's leftover oven roasted veggies with sunny side up eggs
Scrambled tofu with herbs and vegetables
Mornings can be busy especially during the weekdays, that is why I suggest having the ideas at hand the night before and if possible prepare some of it for the morning. For example if you roast veggies for dinner, roast some extra for breakfast too. You can make overnight gluten free oats that you just warm up (or not, depends on how you like it, or if it's warm or cold where you live) and add nuts, seeds and fresh berries in the morning.
Slice the bread and cut the veggies the night before for for avocado toast or liver pate toast. You can keep the bread in sealed bags to maintain the freshness and the veggies in a sealed glass container in the refrigerator.
Another tip that I have is to plan for the week ahead over the weekend. You can lay out a blueprint of what you and your family will have for dinner and breakfast and jot it down, that way you don't have to think and scramble every day for ideas.
I hope this will inspire you to get the fuel you need every morning and start your day in a happy way.
Comments