Be a Breakfast Believer
Rev Your Engine with Breakfast
Food is fuel for our bodies and minds and some of the highest-octane fuel we can ingest is a nutritious, balanced breakfast. “No time,” you say? “I might gain weight,” you fret? “I don’t like breakfast foods,” you claim? Herein I will render you excuseless!
This truism still carries weight: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” A host of good reasons exist to incorporate a nutritious, delicious, and perhaps not-so-traditional meal into your morning. Preparing a power-packed breakfast need not be tedious and time-consuming, and once you begin making this a part of your morning routine, you’ll wonder how you ever made it through the morning on a belly full of coffee.
Dessert First?
One in five Americans skips breakfast, and many who do eat consume what amounts to a piece of cake. You wouldn’t eat a scone or muffin for dinner (would you?), so why do these choices seem fit for breakfast? Well, they aren’t and here’s why. Pastries and the like are made up of simple carbohydrates (i.e. sugar and refined flour), which break down very rapidly and go straight to the bloodstream, causing blood sugar to spike and then plummet due to a surge in insulin. With this blood sugar crash comes what I call “the pit,” a dip in energy and crazy hunger that make you reach for another donut before lunch. Because the body is constantly in search of homeostasis, it wants the equivalent high to the low you just subjected it to, thus the spike-inducing donut.
Make Your Choices Count
Complex carbohydrates, on the other hand, don’t rush to the bloodstream and save you from the blood sugar roller coaster. Whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and some fruits take longer to digest and dole our their energy-giving over a period of time. (Bananas, cantaloupes, mangoes, papayas, and pineapples are considered simple carbohydrates due to their high sugar content; apples, cherries, grapefruits, oranges, pears, and plums contain less sugar.) Maintaining a steady blood sugar level, not just at breakfast, but also at every meal and snack, is key to warding off insulin resistance syndrome, which can be the precursor to diabetes.
The beauty of focusing on whole grains (and fruit) is that you’ll get a good allotment of your daily fiber needs. Fiber helps lower the risk of heart disease, some types of cancer, and diabetes and also helps maintain blood pressure.
Still, there is just a little more to the picture. To build a breakfast with real staying power, you need protein and good fats. Both help you feel fuller longer, which makes it much easier to walk past the box of donuts. Eggs have long been the breakfast protein staple, and for good reason; they are a near-perfect balance of amino acids. Other good breakfast proteins include nuts and nut butters, yogurt, cheese, and quality breakfast meats.
Now back to the fat. Good-for-you fats are a very important macronutrient and won’t make you fat, as it takes fat to burn fat. Organic full fat cheese, yogurt, and cottage cheese (yes, full fat, not skim), avocadoes, flax seeds, fish and nuts are all great breakfast choices. See, this isn’t so hard, as you can get fat and protein from some of the same sources! (For more information about fats, see my Presentmagazine.com article "I Hope You Get Fat".)
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