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A Better Breakfast Habit

Eating in the morning can be a challenge! But getting in the habit of having breakfast can affect your hunger and eating choices late into the day. I share my experience with breakfast and offer some tips and recipes to help you implement a better breakfast habit





Breakfast has frequently been a struggle for me over the years. While I wake up hungry, I am often so busy that I get distracted and it’s lunch time before I prioritize feeding myself. One of the benefits of having a child, is that having to feed her 3 meals and 2-3 snacks per day forces me to make time and space for my own meals. So these days I have found myself in more of a groove when it comes to breakfast. While I am still crazy busy, making breakfast more of a priority has been so beneficial. If dietitians are known for anything, its for encouraging more vegetable intake, and touting the importance of breakfast. So here I go, falling into the cliché of my profession:


Breakfast can be hard! Mornings are busy, often they are early and it can feel difficult to eat first thing in the morning. Plus getting ten minutes less sleep to make breakfast can feel like quite the sacrifice when your alarm goes off at 5:30 AM.


"Often this can lead to not recognizing our fullness cues, and it becomes easy to eat more than our body needs, and to reach for easy to digest carbohydrates (sugar)"

Despite the sacrifice, the payoff can be enormous. Skipping breakfast has a significant impact on blood sugar and energy during the day. After an overnight fast (not eating), our body is ready for food first thing in the morning. Without this, our blood sugar can drop rather low by the time we eat lunch. Often this can lead to not recognizing our fullness cues, and it becomes easy to eat more than our body needs, and to reach for easy to digest carbohydrates (sugar). This leads to a rapid rise in blood sugar shortly after lunch, followed by a blood sugar crash in the early afternoon. By the time we drag ourselves home after work, we are ravenous and can have difficulty with appropriate snacking in the evening.


Besides the impact on blood sugar, our bodies keep track of if we have eaten enough throughout the day. When we skip breakfast, our bodies typically attempt to make up for this by snacking in the afternoon. When I was skipping breakfast frequently, I would come home from work and would grab a snack, and would continue to snack while making dinner. The foods that were easy to grab for snacks were also not ones that were particularly nutrient dense. This is because my body was looking for fast calories to make up for the deficit that I started the day with.


By giving ourselves the right start to the day, our blood sugar and therefor our energy can be more consistent throughout the day. This can also help up be more in tuned with hunger and fullness cues when we do eat, and it helps us make decisions about what we eat not from a place of low blood sugar desperation.


So how does one implement a breakfast habit? All the knowledge I had gained through my education didn’t solve my breakfast problem. What did help was having the right tools, recipes, and approach, so that is what I am sharing with you! Each of these tips are from my own personal experience, and I have collected my favorite quick breakfast recipes to help make implementing your breakfast habit easier.


While I hope these tips and recipes are helpful, each situation is a little different so feel free to discuss this with me in a session if you are interested in a more personalized approach.



Breakfast Habit Tips:


Tip #1: Commit – after regularly skipping breakfast, your body has gotten accustom to the feeling of hunger in the morning. It can take some time after implementing your breakfast habit before you “feel” like eating in the mornings. This is normal, and your body will adjust. Commit to 2 weeks of breakfasts before assessing if your hunger in the morning is a good enough cue to continue the habit


Tip #2: Plan – first thing in the morning you are tired and convincing yourself to start a new habit requires a lot of will power. Hack your willpower by planning or making your breakfast the night before! Below are some ideas, recipes, and links to recipes to make breakfast even easier.


Tip #3: Record – make notes about how you feel at the beginning of the two weeks, and throughout the process to be able to compare how eating breakfast every day impacts your energy, hunger, focus, and food choices. This can provide encouragement and justification to continue your new habit!



Ideas and Recipes:


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