Fueling Your Day Right: Balanced Breakfast Ideas To Curb Cravings

Many people want to eat healthy but don’t know where to start.  People try pantry clean outs, fridge and freezer purges, diet books, 10 day detox and various other diets, but none of these are sustainable. We’ve all been there. Why not simplify and just start with breakfast? Your first meal of the day, whether that happens at 7am, 9am or 11am, truly is the most important meal of the day.  

Research shows what you eat as your first food of the day can help you reduce food cravings throughout the day. Start with a sugary carb heavy meal and you will likely crave more carbs within a matter of a few hours.  Start with a protein, fiber-rich meal with healthy fats and you will not only stay fuller longer, it may prevent overeating later in the day.  Added benefits of a balanced breakfast allow you to stabilize your blood sugar and avoid swings – we all know what it feels like to have a cup of coffee and a gooey cinnamon roll! Tasty as it is going down, the sugar crash is usually not worth it.  (Stay tuned in a future post for ways to enjoy those occasional treats without the crash!)

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A little background on why eating this way is so important for me… For most of my life you wouldn’t catch me without snacks in my purse, backpack or tote. And this was even before having kids! Early in our dating life, my husband used to call them my Scooby snacks.  Childish as it seems, but not more childish than me throwing an adult tantrum (hangary!) when I had a sugar low which sadly happened all the time.  Not knowing how to solve this issue, I ate about 6 small meals a day and often had snacks in between to not have the ups and downs of energy and blood sugar. I did this for most of my adult life.  It feels awful and it is not normal.  Poor metabolic health is the culprit but the good news is this state of health is preventable and very reversible. 

The biggest change that catapulted my life into better health was the simple habit of upping my breakfast game. Meals such as the ones below are part of my regular routine now. Full of protein, fat and fiber- they keep me full for 3 to 4 hours before I even think about food again. This feels so much better than the roller coaster of drastic blood sugar fluctuations all day.  The unexpected benefit of beginning my day this way? I naturally wanted to start eating this way for lunch, and then repeat at dinnertime.  And I was feeling so good with this way of eating that good habits began to stack on top of each other.  And without even directly trying to, the 10 lbs of weight I gradually and somewhat unknowingly gained over the years fell off and never returned.  

Morning Nutrition Matters: Optimal Breakfast Ideas That Set You Up For the Day Ahead

• Chia seed pudding, berries and nut/seed granola
• Smoothie with chocolate protein powder, frozen banana, peanut or almond butter, chia seeds
• Fried eggs in olive oil, ezekiel toast with almond butter, sliced avocado and berries
• Greek yogurt with walnuts, hemp seeds and berries
• Egg scramble with spinach, chicken sausage and sliced avocado + nut and seed bread with chia jam
• Ezekiel toast with almond butter and chia jam + cottage cheese sprinkled with Everything But the Bagel seasoning and a handful of cherry tomatoes 
• Veggie and Quinoa Egg Bites + yogurt with berries
• Overnight oats

These meals may seem like a lot of food or perhaps you cannot picture yourself eating all of this in one sitting.  Remember that your first meal can happen at any time of the day.  I couldn’t possibly get this amount of food down, or any for that matter, at 6:30am. I’m just not naturally hungry until around 9am or so and at that point my body is telling me it’s time to eat!  Obviously, we all have different schedules and many of us may need to run out the door by 7 or 8am.  This calls for a bit of extra planning but it’s worth it, I promise.  Egg bites are portable as is chia pudding and overnight oats – these have come with me to hair appts, on road trips, to the classroom when I was teaching/subbing, to my kids’ sports tournaments, you name it.  The idea is just to start with your first meal of the day.  Why not start tomorrow?