Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
“Eat Breakfast Like a King, Lunch Like a Prince, and Dinner Like a Pauper”
There are numerous sayings espousing the benefit, and necessity, of eating breakfast. However, people still manage to overlook breakfast’s importance, or consume atrocious foods that are almost worse than not eating at all. If you separate breakfast into two words you are left with break fast, where you are literally breaking the 10 plus hour fast since your last meal the day before. Over night, while asleep, your body uses a great number of chemical resources to repair and recover from the day’s activities. In the morning, it is important to restore some of the spent nutrients and prepare the body for the day ahead. If you view breakfast, and nutrition as a whole, from this mechanistic viewpoint, you may start to realize why sugar-laden cereal in skim milk may not be the best meal to start your day, regardless of what the self-interested marketers and media want you to believe.
After a, hopefully, restful night sleep your body requires a few different nutrients to refill your metaphorical tank and get your engine primed for the day ahead. The two macronutrients that are the most important to consume are protein and fat. Think meat. For a variety of reasons, carbohydrates don’t need to be considered in the morning for breakfast, for most people. Beyond protein and fat, your body also needs lots of micronutrients, and fiber, to replenish all of the vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients used during the repair cycles of sleep, and the fiber keeps your digestive and elimination system moving. For the micronutrients, preferentially think vegetables, with fruit coming in second place.
At its simplest, breakfast should be meat and vegetables. The challenge for humans, that like our food to come in a tasty presentation, is to figure out how to prepare meat and vegetables to satisfy our culinary desires. There are endless recipes and food preparation recommendations that you can follow to turn your meat and vegetables into a palatable, even delicious, meal. The point here, is that meat and vegetables/ fruit should be the staple part of your breakfast.
One idea, for now, is to remove any conceptions you have of what constitutes a breakfast food versus a dinner food. If you like filet mignon, or some other steak, eat it for breakfast. Steak is usually pretty quick and easy to prepare. If you liked sautéed bell peppers, onions, and mushrooms, great. Eat that veggie medley with your steak and you have yourself a tasty, nutritional breakfast. Think about the foods that you like, and figure out a way to make those in the morning for breakfast. Don’t be restricted to foods that you think you should eat for breakfast, because they are marketed as breakfast foods.