Eating breakfast is like saving for retirement. We all know it should be a top priority, but it always seems like starting tomorrow is a better idea. Yet, study after study shows that people who make time for an early meal are much more likely to maintain a healthy body weight. Plus, eating breakfast can improve focus, energy levels and reduce homicidal tendencies.
Lucky for all of us, there are some breakfast ideas that are so easy, delicious and nutritious that they are capable of helping us to overcome the very strong forces of morning inertia.
The morning breakfast pie is just such an option. It consists of toasted bread (preferably whole grain), nut butter (peanut or almond work great) and sliced fresh fruit. My favorites are apples, strawberries and blue berries.
The morning breakfast pie has everything you need to start your day out right. The bread offers complex carbohydrates for energy and fiber. The nut butter has a bit of protein to keep you feeling satisfied and a tad of healthy fats. The fruit offers just the right bit of sweetness, vitamins, even more fiber and a head start on your five-a-day.The morning breakfast pie takes less than two minutes to make and is a great investment in the rest of your day.
Make one today for a happier, leaner and more productive tomorrow!
We all know salads are good for us, full of fiber, vitamins in their natural states and healthy oils. Unfortunately, making salads on a daily basis can be as much fun as cleaning out the crisper drawer. For some reason, after a full day making a healthful salad feels like a monumental chore. Luckily for you, there is the Salad of the Week solution.
I learned this practice from a very healthful roommate that I lived with for a few months (she also stretched during conversations and danced along the beach wearing her walkman). Each week Super Healthy roommate would visit the local farmers market, stock up on produce and then come home and make a giant salad. She would put the mega salad in the biggest Tupperware bowl I had ever seen and then eat from it for the rest of the week (she ate it without dressing, so maybe she was part rabbit).
This method is brilliant for many reasons. Jumping right on top of the produce before it is even put away ensures that nothing is stashed and forgotten, avoiding the sad, gooey fate of so many vegetables bought by well intentioned people. Also, making one big salad can be a relaxing meditative experience, as opposed to the daily grind of pulling everything out, chopping a little bit of each and then putting everything away again. Salad mass production is much more efficient than the frustrating piece-meal method.
The best part is that when a salad is pre-made and ready to eat you are much more likely to eat more salad thereby keeping your nutritional halo shiny and green.
So get chop, chopping and let the good health roll!
White bread is the crack of the carbohydrate kingdom. I had this thought while enjoying a completely fiber-free roasted pork sandwich made with pillowy, white bread. Most of the time I stick to whole grains, and I had almost forgotten how seductive the sweet, soft kiss of white bread could be. As I chewed, the pork mostly since the bread melted instantly in my mouth, I tried to think of metaphors to describe the experience. The bread was like cotton candy, or your favorite 1,000 times washed t-shirt, or like a baby bunny or the under skin of an old lady’s arm. I stopped there. Suddenly the name Wonder Bread made sense. If you had been eating rough, grainy, sandpaper bread your whole life, white bread would seem like a culinary wonder; such a shame that it’s also a nutritional quagmire.
Like most Americans I struggle to get enough fiber in my diet. I probably think about fiber more then I actually eat it, and I’m troubled whenever I read the statistics. If they are even close to true the Great American bowel is not going anywhere and very slowly.
In a wheat kernel, fiber is the indigestible parts of plant based foods. It acts like dumbbells in your GI track, stimulating the muscles to stay smooth and strong as they move the weights along. White bread is more like pillows in your intestine, fun to play with, but not much of a workout. This probably explains why fiber lovers generally have lower rates of colon cancer. Besides personally training your GI track, wonder fiber also helps lower blood cholesterol, risk of heart disease, diabetes and other digestive track ailments, assists with constipation and probably a lot of other good things they haven’t even figured out yet.
There is lots of fiber in whole grains, but it is taken out, along with almost all the other nutrients during the modern refining process. When people first switched over to modern white bread they started getting rickets and other weird diseases, so in 1942 Congress Passed the US Enrichment Act. This law forced bread makers to put back some of the nutrients they strip mined out during the milling process, specifically iron, thiamin, riboflavin and niacin. The law did not address fiber and the nation has been getting a lot of reading done ever since. Perhaps there will be a million constipated man march on Washington some time soon and Obama will make whole grains the law of the land.
Until then to keep your GI track sleek and buff eat lots of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, beans and brown rice. If it’s been nothing but pillow fights in your pipeline for a while start slowly and drink lots of extra water. You may not be able to show off your hot healthy colon at the beach like the rest of your muscles, but there are lots of other benefits I know you will enjoy.
I’m always on the lookout for something fresh and different for my morning’s nutritional amusement. We all agree that breakfast is the nutritional launch pad for the rest of the day, but it’s so easy to get bored and fall back into naughty habits like skipping it altogether or grabbing a carb bomb muffin.
Many of us grew up on the televised brain washing of children’s cereal commercials. If you hear 10,000 times before the age of 10, that “this is part of a nutritionally balanced breakfast,” it makes an impression, especially if you are told by an animated elf or animal. Turns out like so many other things we were told as children that was a big fat, sugary lie. We have since learned that the processed cereals that we ate as kids were a very, very small part of a nutritionally balanced breakfast. Eating the box might have been a more natural, higher fiber experience. Perhaps taking nutritional suggestions from Tony the Tiger and The Fruit Loop Toucan wasn’t such a great idea.
But just when you thought you had to settle for a sad, adult life of bran branches and whole grain gruel, Annie’s steps into save the day. Our favorite food superhero has already wowed us with organic mac’ and cheese and lots of other wholesome snacks shaped like bunnies. Cocoa and vanilla bunny cereal is another welcome edition to their line of healthy, comfort food. The cereal is as adorable as a breakfast food can be and boasts of “no icky additives or pesky preservatives.” Amazingly the white bunnies are created using real vanilla and the brown bunnies are made from authentic cocoa. There is no dreadful partial hydrogenated corn oil or high fructose corn syrup to toxify your bodily temple. In fact there are only ten total ingredients, none of which could be mistaken for chemical reactions.
Try a bowl of bunnies and your favorite milk product to start the day or as an afternoon pick me up. Who can be sad with all those bunnies around?
In the name of full disclosure it must be said that a bunny based breakfast doesn’t have the fiber kick of oatmeal or much protein, but its way better then the many other sweet cereal alternatives. Cocoa and Vanilla Bunny Cereal is delightfully crunchy and not too sweet. Give it a try if you are trying to find a fun way to ease into morning healthiness. Try pairing it with sliced bananas or strawberries to give your bunnies something to play with.
My cat Smurf will eat just about anything, from the processed concoction that is dry, diet cat food, to the mysterious blend that is wet, and any kind of meat or dairy product in between. This morning I was woken to a slamming in the kitchen and the soft patter of her paws down the wood floor of the hallway. I rose to find her hunkered down over a piece of crust from last night’s frozen pizza. Just about the only things Smurf won’t eat are fruits and vegetables; which makes her palate very similar to the average American’s.
Except for beets!
I discovered this aberration when I spilled a bowl of cooked, cubed beets onto the kitchen floor. Smurf went to town on those beety beets, risking decapitation from the refrigerator door without a second thought. I was surprised and intrigued as I had never seen her eat anything that didn’t have, or come from, something with a face. Was it the blood red color, reminiscent of raw meat that brought her on or the nutty, perhaps vaguely meaty taste of the root itself? Due to the language barrier, we may never know.
What we do know is that even though beets are not as famous as some other rooty vegetables, such as carrots and potatoes, their unique coloration makes them a nutritional treasure trove. Beet roots are rich in a plethora of nutrients including folic acid, potassium, calcium, Vitamin C and Vitamin A. Their telltale redness is an active ingredient that is thought by many nutritionists and natural health practitioners to thwart tumor growth, heal the liver and detoxify blood.
If your first experience with beets involved the pickled or candied varieties then you may be suffering from Post Traumatic Abused Vegetable Syndrome or PTAVS. Chances are you are hesitant to try them again and I understand your pain. I too thought of beets as foul red pickles, used for garnish and torturing children. I truly hope that you will give them another chance and discover their tastiness for yourself.
The versatile fresh beet root can be eaten raw, boiled, steamed, roasted (my favorite), or sautéed. They are great on salads and can be used as a meat substitute on sandwiches or burgers. Their peak season is June through October, but because they store well they can be found year round. If you decide to boil you beets, cook them with the skins on to minimize their magical nutrients leaching out into the water.
I beet-seech you to expand your vegetable horizons and give beets a try! If you hate them, you can always feed them to your cat.
As we grow older it becomes painfully obvious that many of the foodstuffs we enjoyed as children were nutritional atrocities. I personally feasted on Craft Mac n’ cheese, silver-foil wrapped Ding Dongs, Cheetos, Rice Crispy treats, Frosted Flakes and many other things composed mostly of high fructose corn syrup and air. Looking back I should be three feet tall with rickets and a skin condition.
Thankfully, there are now some more healthful versions of those delicious, anti-nutritious childhood snacks.
I made brown rice crispy treats for my fitness bootcampers recently and they loved them. The crew gobbled them up immediately after a grueling hill workout and I felt pleased to be sending them home to their spouses and children with a decent blood sugar level for once. This version forgoes traditional Rice Crispies for puffed brown rice cereal, eliminating a bucketful of sugar and adding some fiber. The dubious yet heroically sticky marshmallows, which are used to hold it all together in the original recipe, are replaced here with peanut butter and brown rice syrup. The peanut butter is a welcome addition bringing some protein and a touch of savoriness to the mix. With or without the optional chocolate chips these are not as overbearingly sweet as the original version. Kids will still love them and adults will too.
These are ridiculously easy to make and would probably last quite a while in the fridge, but I can almost guarantee you that they won’t. If you live with hungry types I recommend at least doubling the recipe. Keep them cool and they will hold together better, but don’t be afraid to wrap them up and take them on the road. Try them with a tall glass of cold, organic milk and the only snap, crackle and pop you hear will be coming from your mouth, not your bones.
Follow the link below for a tempting photo and an easy to follow recipe:
We all know salads are good for us, full of fiber, vitamins in their natural states and healthy oils. Unfortunately, making salads on a daily basis can be as much fun as cleaning out the crisper drawer. For some reason, after a full day making a healthful salad feels like a monumental chore. Luckily for you, there is the Salad of the Week solution.
