Tips for a Stress-Free Breakfast

Photo by Fábio Hanashiro on Unsplash

Whether breakfast is the most important meal of the day or not, it sure seems to be the most challenging for people to look forward to. For most of my clients, breakfast needs to be quick, easy and convenient. These needs are often somewhat at odds with a lot of health goals. 

My nutrition guidance around breakfast usually includes the following: 

• Break your fast within an hour of waking,
• Incorporate a generous amount of protein to stabilize your energy, mood, appetite and cravings throughout the day (25 grams is a good goal), and
• Work in some leafy greens or dark berries to replenish the antioxidants depleted in the night as your body does its best healing work. 

True confession: this is hard for me. 

I love a long, slow morning. I wake up at least 2 hours before I need to leave the house so I can bring a cup of coffee back to bed to journal and meditate (and often text excessively with my ride-or-die). It's one of my daily pleasures. And while you would think 2 hours is plenty of time to do that, eat some breakfast, get my pup out for a walk and get ready for my day, I savor the pleasure so much that I haven't been making much time for all those other things lately! 

TL;DR: Breakfast needs to be quick, easy and convenient for me too.

Here are some tips for making breakfast work better for you. I'll follow those tips with some breakfast ideas and recipes. 

Include Breakfasts in Your Meal Plan
One of the most obvious ways to make a good (delicious, sustaining, nutritious) breakfast happen is to plan for it like you plan for dinners and lunches. A lot of people forget to include breakfast in their meal plans - the most convenient meal is one that's already planned out!

Organize Breakfast Options
Sometimes the hardest part about deciding what to eat for breakfast is coming up with one idea that sounds even kinda, sorta tasty. Make it easier on yourself: keep a list. Every time you have a delicious breakfast, write it down. Writing it down could mean saving the recipe to a folder on your desktop or bookmarking it in a browser folder...whatever works for you! But save it for the day you lose all inspiration and just need a spark of "yum!"

Meal Prep to Include Breakfast
​If you have a routine for a weekly meal prep, include breakfast. Many of the recipe and meal ideas below can be prepped ahead and reheated. What's quicker than that?!


Breakfast Ideas and Recipes
Here are some of my current breakfast staples and some others that have stood the test of time: 

• Rice cakes with peanut or nut butter and berry compote
• Salad greens with a couple poached eggs and half an avocado...and maybe some other veggies if I'm feeling wild
• Leftover rice or buckwheat groats sautéed with kale, mushrooms, garlic and eggs
• Turkey Apple Breakfast Hash (with or without a fried egg on top - This is one I prep on the weekend to reheat during the weekdays.)
• Coconut Cacao Granola with fresh or frozen (and thawed) berries and coconut yogurt
• Crustless quiche (here's an example, though the recipe I follow/work off is from the Practical Paleo cookbook. This is another prep ahead and reheat idea.)
• Quinoa Vegetable Soup with poached eggs

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How do you make breakfast stress-free? Share your tips in the comments below! 
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