Breakfast like a Boss

Breakfast is indeed the most important meal of the day. However, breakfast should not be the biggest nor the heaviest meal of the day. Making a few simple tweaks in your morning routine will set you off to having a better day and better health.

Let’s start off with the worst thing you could do for breakfast. The worst thing you could do is start your day off with a breakfast sandwich. Breakfast sandwiches and breakfast burritos are incredibly popular breakfast choices for average American families.

However, these sandwiches and burritos typically consists of white biscuits, white bread, or white tortillas filled with fattening, low-grade cheese and pork sausage. Oftentimes people will couple this with a cup of coffee with a ton of sugar and imitation creamer or even wash it all down with Sunny D or some other highly sweetened orange flavored ‘drink.’

Why is this the worst way to start your day off? Think about it. You’ve been fasting all night. If you got an adequate amount of sleep the previous night, you slept at least 7 - 8 hours in the night. If you’re eating dinner properly, you should have had your dinner a couple of hours before you laid down to sleep. So that means you been fasting for about 10 to 12 hours. That’s what we call breakfast, break the fast.

It’s extremely brutal on the body to break the fast with heavy, fattening, and system clogging foods. The flour from the biscuits, tortillas, and white bread are processed in the body as sugar. Then on top of that, add the sugar from the coffee and the juice. This puts the body on a sugar crash and burn cycle which is established at the beginning of the day. Usually people who eat like this are craving more sugar before lunch. After crashing down from the sugar high, the body feels lethargic, has a difficult time concentrating, and craves more sugar.

How can you start your day off better? The first thing that should hit your stomach should be purified water. Try to start your day by drinking 8 to 12 ounces of purified water on an empty stomach. Keep a bottle of water by your bed so that the first thing that you do before your feet hit the ground is to drink a water. If you really want to start your day off with a bang, you could then prepare an herbal tea. Boil purified water, and add the juice of one lemon, one clove of garlic, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and one tablespoon of olive oil. This is a great tonic to detoxify your body.

Everyone knows that it can be a struggle to get in enough servings of fruits and vegetables in each day. So why not start your breakfast off right?

You can start your day by getting two servings of fruit out the way at breakfast. You may even be able to get in a serving of vegetables to start your day out.

An easy way to get in one to two servings of fruits is to add a cup of berries to oatmeal, quinoa, or granola. Use a nut milk instead of cow’s milk to cut down on harmful antibiotics and growth hormones. Important to note: the majority of people with African ancestry are lactose intolerant.

Or, you can get 2 to 3 servings of fruits by making a fruit salad it eating with a side of whole-grain toast. Also, you can get 2 to 3 servings of fruit and a serving of vegetables by making a fruit smoothie for breakfast. To make your fruit smoothie a little bit more filling, add in a couple tablespoons of nut butter.

For example you could add cashew butter, almond butter, or sunflower seed butter. Simply add fruits (frozen or fresh), nut milk, nut butter, a bunch of spinach and blend. You can power up your smoothies by adding in a teaspoon of spirulina, alfalfa, or other herbs or supplements that you need for your specific health needs.

Alternatively you could drink a veggie broth to start your day off. The main objective with your breaking the fast is to ease your way into consuming foods for the day. To motivate yourself and to get off on the right foot, make sure that you drink water, include fruits and vegetables, and avoid anything heavy or unhealthy.

Pancakes, waffles, eggs, meats, imitation meats, etc. are not bad if relegated to one weekend day a week or special occasions. But, it’s a recipe for weight gain, constipation, diabetes, heart disease and other ailments if those heavy items are on the menu daily.

Lunch should be your biggest meal of the day. After all, you’re eating lunch at the height of the day. When thinking breakfast, think light. Don’t make the mistake of skipping breakfast all together. If you’re not big into breakfast, try drinking a smoothie or eating one piece of fruit with water and a purifying tea. Many people suffer from sluggish metabolisms because they skip meals and binge once or twice a day. The body is then operating in starvation mode and stores all fat because it can’t predict when the next meal will come.

For your breakfast think light, eat right, and your days will be healthy, long and bright.  

Written by: Editorial Staff