Why You Should Train Yourself to Eat Breakfast

Hopefully, this post will inspire you to think differently about your breakfast choices.

I was never hungry for breakfast, especially when I was younger.  I would try to skip it, but usually forced into eating something by my family.  The truth is I hardly appreciated a hearty morning meal such as oatmeal or eggs and toast so early in the morning because my body clock wasn’t set to the same time.  Usually, I got hungry a few hours later around ten o’clock instead of six in the morning, which accounted for a part of the problem.

Still, I knew it was important to eat a healthy breakfast and benefit from those vitamins, nutrients and minerals, commonly found in this meal over others.  If not, I would be dragging without the energy, I needed to keep up besides starving a few hours before lunch. The reason for this drained feeling, not to mention lack of brain power, is because I was running around on yesterday’s stored glucose when I should have been refueling for a new day.  

Here are some ideal breakfast suggestions.

Missing breakfast or grabbing something like a sweet roll or a slice of toast and a cup of coffee also made me more prone to weight gain and could jeopardize my health from lack of balanced nutrition from three complete meals.  Believe it or not, your bad cholesterol (LDL) cholesterol can go up in just a short span of a few weeks over long-term.

Therefore, the choice of foods like oatmeal and other cereals with plenty of fiber for breakfast does matter to best help prevent a spike in your bad cholesterol numbers that could result in a heart attack or increase your blood sugar. You can also get plenty of fiber from a serving of low-fat or Greek yogurt with some granola that you add.  

Why fiber is so important is because of its amazing ability to cling onto the cholesterol and accelerate its removal from your body before it clogs up the arteries.  Consequently, you should aim for about five grams of fiber for breakfast and strive for about 25 grams total for the day for a woman and 30 to 38 grams for a man.  

For example, one cup of oatmeal has four grams of fiber.  Yet, there are ways to boost the fiber in an oatmeal breakfast such as with as little as a half of a banana (1-1/2 grams of fiber) or tablespoon peanut butter (one gram of fiber) to oatmeal that you added some unsweetened cocoa before cooking.  Here’s my recipe for chocolate-peanut butter oatmeal that does remind me of a peanut-butter cup.  

Of course, you can get tired of eating oatmeal every day.  Fiber brans flakes have about seven grams per serving. Eggs are packed with excellent protein and choline, lots of vitamin B, A, D and minerals, but lack fiber.  If you’re a toast lover, then one slice of white bread has about 0.8 grams of fiber whereas one slice of whole-wheat bread has 1.99 grams.  

Other days, you could whip together a healthy, liquid breakfast with some apple (seven grams of fiber), a banana (three grams), the low fat milk or Greek yogurt in your juicer or blender.  Almond milk is also very good in this drink.  Usually, I throw in what other fruit that I have on hand like blueberries or grapes and just blend until I get the right consistency of smoothie.  

For those days that you’re strapped for time to sit at the breakfast table, I have another suggestion.  Try wrapping a few whole grain crackers with low-fat cheese to take with you.  You can always munch these at your desk instead of going without.

Therefore, I learned how to reset my body clock by not eating anything at night past o’ eight clock in the evening so that I would be hungry at breakfast.  After several weeks, my body clock finally adjusted to the new routine.  In fact,  I later looked forward to an early breakfast.