A Healthy Breakfast is Our Only Chance to Start the Day Right

A healthy breakfast is the nutritional equivalent of this popular notion: “You only get one chance to make a good first impression.”

This saying holds true for a date or a job interview, but when it comes to our health, every day we awaken gives us a chance to get our day off to a healthy start. What impression do you make on your health each morning?

Breakfast is the first decision we make each day that determines if we are going to have a healthy day or unhealthy day. This usually reflects the type of person we are. For instance:

Healthy people tend to regard breakfast as the most important meal of the day and make sure they eat right to meet their energy needs for the day ahead of them.

Cakes made of fruits and cottage cheese

For unhealthy people, breakfast holds no particular significance, so they gobble down the quickest and sweetest meal they can create or pass on breakfast altogether in place of the 11:30 lunch buffet.

Which person are you? Let’s give these two approaches to breakfast a closer look starting with the typical breakfast choices of overweight or obese people.

Unhealthy people anxiously wake up to a voluminous breakfast mostly comprised of what can only be described as ‘morning fast foods.’ Because of sleep, they feel they have deprived themselves of food for eight or more hours, the longest they will go without eating all day.

They do not wake up refreshed and recharged for the day ahead because their body was not at rest overnight. Instead, their digestive system was busily breaking down the huge dinner and late-night raid of the refrigerator from the evening before.

Such people do not recognize a good night’s sleep as essential to their health. Instead, they see slumber time as sort of an overnight fast or famine that has to be halted at the earliest opportunity when they arise.

I often eat bananas for breakfast. This is a universal food, from which you can prepare many useful and tasty dishes.

Consequently, overweight or obese people, whether they feel hungry or not, indulge in these kinds of unhealthy breakfast food choices:

• Two or three cups of coffee with extra sugar and cream.

• Several slices of white toast smothered with sweetened jams.

• Frosted Flakes or other sugar-coated cereals drowned in homogenized milk and coated with more white or brown sugar.

or

• Three eggs with sizzling greasy bacon or ham or sausages and home fries with a stack of pancakes smothered with maple syrup.

These breakfast food choices get our day off to a very unhealthy start for these reasons:

• They are loaded with excess calories and ‘dead’ processed foods that provide very little nutritional value.

• Since these poorly combined foods don’t digest all that well, they zap us of energy by overworking our digestive system rather than provide us with energy more importantly needed to achieve our daily activities.

My breakfast always includes fruit!

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

On the other hand, healthy people see a healthy breakfast as an opportunity to best prepare them for the day ahead. Accordingly, their breakfast food choices tend to be as follows:

One coffee maximum with a glass of freshly squeezed juice.

• Multi-grain or 100% whole wheat toast with nominal butter. Rather than slather their toast with processed jams, a bit of peanut butter, unsweetened cinnamon powder or natural honey are wiser spreads.

• Multi-grain cereals or hot oatmeal with fresh fruit toppings instead of added table sugars.

• Substitute leaner ham or Canadian back bacon or turkey bacon for regular strip bacon and when having a protein breakfast, pass on the home fries and replace with slices of tomato or a fruit salad side.

Sandwiches with whole grain bread

These are healthier breakfast food choices for the following reasons:

• Most of these foods provide necessary live enzymes to help the immune system and the digestive process so that all essential nutrients are extracted and the rest is efficiently removed as waste.

• The carbohydrates consumed are low glycemic index foods, which help to regulate the hormone insulin and maintain proper blood sugar levels that are important for both diabetics and non-diabetics.

• Since our brain must function sharply during the day, the only nutrition it requires is glucose, which is extracted solely from low glycemic carbohydrate foods.

• Although a protein breakfast is not in the best interest of our health, leaner meat choices are helpful and should be countered with fresh juice or fruit. A three-egg vegetable omelette gives you plenty of protein and any type of potato should be avoided. When having a protein-rich breakfast, make sure to counter it with a carbohydrate-rich lunch and dinner as it should make up two-thirds of our daily diet intake.

Healthy people recognize breakfast as the most important meal of each day because it dictates how we feel and therefore how we perform each day. Healthy people never skip a nourishing breakfast.

Breakfast in bed from my beloved husband :)

If you make a healthy breakfast a priority, congratulations. You have at least given yourself the chance to enjoy a day of vibrant health and vitality. This is critically important because if we are lucky, we get to make this decision approximately 28,000 times during our lifetime.

Or perhaps the importance of breakfast should be stated this way: When we get our day off to a good start by having a healthy breakfast, we get to do that 28,000 or more times during our cherished lifetime.

Note: Some dietitians and registered nutritionists would not recommend some of the food choices above, such as strip bacon or sausages since they may contain nitrates, fillers and other unhealthy ingredients.

I recommends them only on a temporary basis, in decreasing amounts, as you gradually change your diet for the better. Eventually, if you consume any breakfast meats at all, it should be leaner cuts of ham or Canadian back bacon, also known as pemeal bacon.

As proven again and again, a quick and complete change of diet is almost always subject to failure. Therefore, I do not recommend that you attempt an overnight transformation from lousy diet to the perfect diet.

Getting your health back is a marathon, not a sprint. Taking this approach will also enable you to keep the weight off over the long term because you will not have merely changed your diet. You will have forever changed the way you eat for the better.

In summer we can afford a huge variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. Use this opportunity. And be healthy!