I have been testing out different breakfasts, noting what I eat, and trying to tune in with my body to understand how I am feeling and if certain foods make me feel differently. I started this off with a few breakfast staples in mind and have been quite surprised to see how my breakfast choice affects my mood, cravings and hunger sensations.
Growing up, I always had toast with peanut butter or jelly or cereal on weekdays or eggs and bacon or pancakes on the weekend. I don’t do eggs or bacon anymore but have added scrambled tofu and beans to my Sunday mornings. With the years, I started to notice that certain mornings, I would feel ravenous, for no good reason! I had had breakfast, but somehow, I needed to snack all morning?!
While I am learning to surf the urge of snacking and be more mindful about my eating habits, I thought that it didn’t have to be so hard. There were days where I feel perfectly fine after eating once in the morning, not getting hungry until 1:00pm.
So here are the combinations that I tested:
- cereal and soy milk with a fruit
- toast (sprouted grain bread) w/ almond or peanut butter with a banana and maybe an orange
- buckwheat pancake with nut butter and banana
- scrambled tofu with beans and veggies with salsa
- eating nothing in the morning 😱😢
While there is nothing inherently wrong with these combinations (except maybe skipping breakfast, not a fan!), my body likes to wake up to this one combination that feels like a power boost that lasts me hours.
So far, good ol’ fashioned rolled oats with these toppings is a winner: berries, chia seeds, hemps seeds and almond butter. AS SIMPLE AS THAT!
I am not trying to achieve any specific protein, carbs or fat goal, I don’t follow any diet other than not consuming dairy, eggs or other animal products.
But this is really an interesting experiment! You can read all you want on keto, carbs being good or bad, fat being the devil, protein being the source of happiness and huge muscles, etc. but at the end of the day, there is you and how food makes you feel.
My approach to nutrition is always to consume whole foods as much as possible and to tweak your diet one day at a time, noticing what feels better and gives you better results.
So here is my go-to recipe for making an Oats and Seeds Power Bowl that keeps you going all morning long!
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup of old fashioned rolled oats (those look like flat, irregularly round, slightly textured discs; they contain more protein, fiber and take longer to digest than quick oats)
- 3/4 cup of Berries (I use frozen raspberries, blueberries, strawberries or blackberries in the Winter and fresh fruit from the market in the Summer)
- 2 1/2 tbsps Hemp seeds
- 2 1/2 tbsps Chia seeds
- 1 1/2 tbsps Almond butter
Instructions
- Add about 1 cup of water to your rolled oats and cook in the microwave 4 minutes. Here is how to make sure it doesn’t overcook or spill: set your microwave to cook at half of its power (for mine, it a level 5 out of 10) instead of going for a quick minute. The slow cooking process allows the oats to keep their texture and not get all mushy
- Once you are satisfied with the cooking (you may want to cook only 3 minutes for a more chewy texture), add the berries, hemp seeds, chia seeds and almond butter.
ENJOY!
Yields 1 serving
Nutritional facts for MBM’s Oats and Seeds Power Bowl (per serving): 25 g Fat – 47 g Carbs – 20 g Protein – 20 g Fiber – 577 Cal