Want To Be Healthier But Don’t Know Where to Start? Three Simple Ways to Rethink Breakfast

I chat with many people who want to make healthier lifestyle choices but just don’t know where to begin. They want a few easy attainable ideas to get started that aren’t overwhelming and can be implemented immediately.  I tell them to rethink breakfast. Making a few simple changes will start your day off on a better, more energetic foot and set the tone for the rest of the day. Also, it just feels good to know you rocked something before even leaving the house! Here are three simple changes I made to my breakfast routine that you can too…

Don’t skip breakfast. Ever.

I used to do this regularly. Worse, I would go do a full cardio workout on an empty stomach messing with my poor body and then go home to a big fruit smoothie packed with too much sugar.  But it’s fruit…it’s healthy I thought! Just not five pounds of it pulverized into a glass! My blood sugar levels protested. Majorly. Recipe for disaster. Something to think about:  If you wait until lunch to eat, you aren’t just waiting a “few” hours from the time you awoke. If your last meal was dinner the previous night, you could be looking at no nourishment for 12-17 hours…not a great idea and you are making your body work far too hard. It took a while for me to adjust to eating bigger meals in the morning – I just didn’t feel hungry. But as my body adjusted, my energy levels improved throughout the day. Now I never leave home without eating.

Ditch the fruit juice

Most of us were raised to have a glass of orange juice every morning – or something similar. It’s what you see in most breakfast commercials right?  It’s also a big shot of sugar without the fiber to help digest that hit to your system.  If you’ve been sleeping for several hours, and your last meal was hours before going to bed, the first jolt your poor system is going to have in the morning is a big shot of sugar.  Switch to room temperature water (throw in a squeeze of lemon) and start paying attention to how much sugar you are starting your day with. Start looking at how much fruit juice you drink every day, then figure out how many pieces of fruit it would take to make that juice. If you shouldn’t eat 10 oranges in a day, and it would take forever and a day to peel them, you shouldn’t be drinking the equivalent either – especially in one sitting! (And if you are experimenting with juicing, make sure you get more veggies in there than fruit!)

Rethink typical breakfast foods

Who says we have to eat the “typical” breakfast of cereal, toast, bagels and take-out breakfast sandwiches and muffins? Who says you can’t reinvent the first meal of your day? There is still a lot of sugar hiding in North American breakfasts. Start getting way out of the cereal box if you will….cook up some extra protein at dinner and try a chicken breast, sausage, homemade patties, fish and pair them with low glycemic fruits or veggies. Avocado is especially satisfying and filling and filled with good fat. Have a mini dinner to start your day like the salmon and asparagus in the photo above. Or scramble some eggs with veggies and put it on a mound of greens. I have found that the more I cut down on sugar in the morning, and eat some protein, the more energy I have throughout the day and the more alert I am.

The more I delved into my reinvention of breakfast, it struck me how many lunch and dinner options we have created for ourselves, yet we’ve  made so many “rules” as to what a typical breakfast should be and have kept the selection so limited. And why does it seem so weird to eat veggies in the morning?  It shouldn’t! How did this come about? Things that make you go hmm… Shake up breakfast for one week to see how you feel. I admit, it was a bizarre feeling for me at first. The first change I made was eliminating fruit juices in the morning. That seemed like a simple start. Once you conquer a few changes, the overall task of reclaiming your health won’t seem so overwhelming. Think of this as your grocery shopping  list. When you head to the store, you don’t pile everything on your list into your cart at once. You systematically go through the store and tick items off one item at a time. All small changes add up. You rock for starting!