Breakfast

Are you into eating breakfast? Is it habitual?

We all know the Talk: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. In our house, breakfast wasn't optional. I didn't know, growing up, that there were people who hated eating in the morning.

I married one.

Then I gave birth to two more.

How did THAT happen?

My husband breaks all the rules about eating. He goes for several hours without eating, then begins to pick up momentum. By evening he is grazing non-stop. He ought to weigh four hundred pounds. He doesn't. Every few years he says to me, "I really should start getting up a bit earlier and having breakfast." It lasts for a day or two. If that.

For him, the answer isn't breakfast food. On a workday, it means he eats his lunch in bits and pieces over his coffee breaks as well as his lunch break. On Saturdays, it means a brunch somewhere around 10:30 or 11. On Sundays his first meal is lunch when we've gotten home from church. Always he needs coffee.

Even surrounded by non-breakfast-eaters and fighting with my kids every schoolday morning through their growing up years, I've never stopped eating breakfast. I like it. If I haven't eaten within an hour of getting up, I'm starving and useless.

Just thought of something. Do you think it has anything to do with being a morning person or a night owl? My pack are night owls, whereas my brain pretty much ceases to function in mid-evening. I'm not a TRUE morning person, either. I don't want to know that five o'clock exists, for example. But I'm willing to get up early enough to have a habitual morning routine before going to work. And that includes breakfast.

For years, breakfast consisted of a slice or two of homemade wholewheat bread, toasted, with butter and cheddar cheese. Because I'd read that women should consume more soy products, I'd also have a smoothie, usually just a banana hucked into chocolate soy milk and whizzed.

In March I took a closer look at my breakfast. While a limited amount of whole grain carbs, such as my bread, was permissable, I didn't want to eat it without the butter and cheddar. The soy milk was REALLY high in calories. Bananas are on Gallop's *yellow* list, meaning they're not going to help with weight loss. I thought I'd been eating a perfectly healthy breakfast! (We won't talk about the butter...)

My mom used to make porridge on school mornings, and I've done so occasionally. In March, I began to make porridge from large flake (also known as regular or slow-cooking as opposed to quick or instant) rolled oats. (Bring a cup of water to a boil with a smidge of salt, add 1/2 cup rolled oats, simmer until thick, 5-10 minutes--use the time to go get dressed or something!) As a child, I'd have this with sugar and milk. Sugar was out. The milk was boring. I thought about it while I turned my attention to the morning smoothie.

I bought soft tofu in 340 gram (about 12 ounce) containers and split a package into quarters. Several people had told me how good bromelain (in pineapple) is for arthritis, so I decided pineapple would be acceptable even though Gallop says its a *yellow*. That opened the door for bananas to come back in. I'd see how I did on this smoothie: 3 ounces of tofu, one banana, a quarter of a tin (1/2 cup) crushed pineapple, then skim milk to the two cup line of the blender. This makes slightly more than two tall glasses, but with my desire to eat two servings of fruit and/or vegetables for every meal plus snacks (8-10 daily), I just drank the whole works.

Then I eyeballed the porridge again, and poured some of the smoothie over it. Voila! A breakfast that (mostly) met the GI guidleines, tasted reasonably good, and was quick to make and consume. As you know, I lost 13 1/2 pounds my first month on the GI, so obviously the banana and pineapple weren't holding me back too much. I ate this for breakfast daily for more than three months. Apparently I don't mind a boring breakfast.

We went tent camping in mid-June for a week. A blender wasn't an option! Thankfully fresh summer fruit was becoming available and I started making fruit salads (kept on until just recently). For the grain part of the breakfast, I turned to the muesli method of porridge-making. The evening before, mix 1/2 cup of large flake rolled oats with 1/3 cup milk and a smidge of salt and stick the container in the fridge (or cooler if you're camping). Add some fruit salad and yogurt in the morning. This became my standard breakfast for the next few months as the varieties of locally available fresh fruit wandered through the season. (My yogurt of choice is non-fat and sweetened with Splenda, such as Silhouette by Danone or Source by Yoplait. I go through a LOT of vanilla flavored yogurt.)

Recently its been fresh peaches, most everything else having petered out. So I chop a peeled peach into a large bowl, add a sliced banana, a good shake of Fiber One cereal and some yogurt.

These are no-brainer breakfasts. I'm not good at thinking in the morning, so for me it works just to reach for the same thing for weeks or months on end. I get variety in my other meals. I see by the produce shelves at the grocery store and at the fruit stands that I will soon be back to my porridge and smoothie. I don't mind the thought. I kind of welcome it, actually.

What is your experience with breakfast? Is it an easy meal for you to make and eat or is it a constant struggle? Do you even bother? I'm curious.