10 Tips for a Healthy Breakfast
Breakfast is a vital meal, setting the tone for your day and providing essential nutrients for optimal body functioning. Personal dietary preferences, like vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, or low-carb choices, impact breakfast decisions. You can try different breakfast options to have something new to look forward to every morning.
So, it’s time to prepare your kitchen gadgets and supplies for healthy meal preparation. A continental breakfast might include croissants, toast, yogurt, and fruit with coffee or juice. On the other hand, American breakfast entails scrambled eggs, bacon, pancakes or waffles, and orange juice or coffee.
Asian breakfasts range from congee to miso soup, while Mediterranean choices encompass olive oil on bread, feta cheese, and herbal tea. Mexican breakfasts may offer chilaquiles or breakfast burritos, and Middle Eastern options might include hummus, shakshuka, and mint tea.
Opt for a healthier option like oatmeal with fruit or a smoothie. Check out GF Oats and other reputable oat brands for nutritious on-the-go breakfasts. Oats are rich in protein, vitamin B6, folate, and minerals. They are exceptionally high in soluble fiber, helping lower cholesterol levels and contribute to better digestive health.
Here are the top 10 tips for a healthy breakfast to ensure energy for your day’s tasks.
- First of all, go to sleep early and rest the required 7-8 hours to get up in time for breakfast. A good breakfast involves waking up rested having slept enough hours. Setting the alarm clock 10-15 minutes earlier than usual is more than enough.
- Eat breakfast when you have an appetite. Remember that one of the functions of breakfast is to break the overnight fast and provide the body with essential nutrients and energy to start the day, but not everyone gets food as soon as they wake up. If you have trouble having breakfast first thing in the morning, or you don’t have enough time in the morning, split your breakfast into two servings, or try small portions. It also helps to whet your appetite to start with all your daily hygiene routines and save breakfast for last, before leaving home. So you give yourself time to wake up completely.
- If you want to stretch the pillow for a few more minutes, you can leave part of your breakfast done the night before. For fruit smoothies, freeze the fruit servings for a serving in individual servings, already peeled and ready to put in the blender. You can leave fruit salads made before you go to sleep as long as you keep them in airtight containers in the fridge and make sure to put some squeezed citrus to prevent oxidation of the fruits. Homemade vegetable patés last perfectly for a week in the fridge, like hummus in all its variants. In Anglo-Saxon countries, porridge (known as porridge) is very famous. Those oats or chia are the most common and are prepared by soaking the grains in question (in milk or vegetable drinks) overnight, inside the refrigerator.
- For those of the brotherhood of the toast, freezing your favorite bread already cut into slices in a paper bag is saving time and money. Freeze it so that you can easily separate them later with a knife (you still have to do a bit of prying) and put it to defrost directly in the toaster. Take advantage of that time to continue preparing the rest of the ingredients for your toast.
- Several studies have suggested that increasing the quantity of protein consumed at breakfast may help with weight loss and satiety. While we wait for the scientific community to confirm this fact, and because the satiating impact of proteins is theoretically expected because they take longer to digest than fats and carbohydrates, increasing the protein level of breakfast is not unrealistic. It’s not about eating more protein; it’s about dispersing it throughout the day: eat less protein at lunch and dinner and more at breakfast. How? Eggs, beans, tinned fish, dairy, or nuts are all good additions. If you are not a fan of a specific ingredient, for example, eggs, you can still find enough ideas to replace them. There are many protein-rich breakfast ideas without eggs you can find online. Forget about the sausages, which are high in salt and other undesirable ingredients. Actually, it’s carcinogenic, so the less you eat, the better.
- Breakfast; let it be loaded with fiber. The more sugar in your breakfast, the easier it will be to digest, so you will be hungry sooner. If you add fruits and vegetables choose whole grains (who needs cereals loaded with sugar as long as there is chia, quinoa, whole-wheat couscous, or millet, to name a few?), Nuts or even legumes in the form of pâtés, you will be contributing to the increase. Fiber from breakfast, which will control your appetite better in the morning. Now remember the advice from point number 5 and let’s combine it with this one: I see a slice of spelled bread with avocado, tomato, and boiled egg, or a chia pudding with strawberries and mint. You’re next?
- If you had a feast the night before and you wake up not hungry, try to make a lighter breakfast, with some whole fruit or in a smoothie, yogurt, or a simple coffee with milk. Ultimately, choose what is less heavy for you, but make sure it provides you with healthy nutrients.
- Take advantage of breakfast to complete the daily consumption of vegetables: from tomato slices, a handful of green leaves (lettuce, arugula, spinach, lamb’s lettuce) to some sautéed mushrooms. Maybe you can use this last option on the weekend; you will surely have more time to honor yourself with a good English breakfast!
- Yes, you have the right to honor yourself over breakfast from time to time. How often? The truth is that if it is a tribute loaded with sugar and saturated fat, the less you do it, the better. Remember that a tribute does not necessarily have to be a hyper-caloric, hyper-sweet, and hyper-fat breakfast. It can simply be a hyper-elaborated breakfast with hyper-different ingredients, together with someone hyper special in a hyper-charming place!
- The best thing about breakfast is that there are no rules. There is life beyond oil toast and the weekend is the best time to experiment with new recipes. The important thing is that you enjoy it and it makes you happy.