We hear it all the time, ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ –
but we want breakfast to be the easiest and quickest to prepare!!!
Whoever thought of breakfast taking the amount of time that dinner often takes.
It’s just not what we have time for! Give me quick, easy, healthy and great tasting.
So how can the one meal that creates the most headache, that can often be the most enjoyed, especially on weekends, that needs to be the most important, also be the healthiest?
If you’re anything like me, there’s been many a morning you stagger to the kitchen so early you’re not even hungry. You whack on the coffee pot in your half awake state and all you can think of is throwing some cereal into a bowl and hope that’ll sustain you until you get to the office and grab another coffee and possibly something not so healthy.
OR you don’t even feel like breakfast! You grab a coffee on the way to work, maybe pick up a muffin and leave it til morning tea time to throw down something else that’s quick and easy and it’s lunchtime before you manage something healthy! The beginning of the day is when we need to be concerned about our blood sugar levels. And yet I don’t know how many posts are out there telling us we need to have a big bowl of fruit with yoghurt and honey to start the day.
No people – we do NOT need a big bowl of sugar laden fruit with honey and yoghurt to give our blood sugar levels a nice big boost – that’s not the ideal way to start your day.
I know, I know, that’s what we’re taught, it’s all over the internet, I’m going to upset a few ‘health gurus’ but sorry, sugar levels are not what you need boosting in the morning.
It’s your brain function, metabolism and gut function that need the boost.
I can guarantee you if you start with a bowl of chopped melon, grapes, apple, banana and strawberries dolloped with honey and yoghurt – by 10 or 11 am you’ll be hungry again.
Green smoothies are brilliant, especially in summer time. But to be beneficial, they need more vegetable content than fruit. But let’s say, maybe you’re a little like me, and a smoothy isn’t something you feel like every morning. Besides – to make a good one, there’s still some preparation and maybe it’s not as quick as you want but you DO want healthy!
Here’s an awesome green smoothy idea in case you have the urge:
Make sure you have a good blender – I’m a believer in the nutribullet style of vitamising NOT juicing. That’s a blog post for another day.
Ingredients:
Half a ripe avocado
Half a banana with a generous squeeze of lime juice
1 celery stick, leaves and all
half a carrot
teaspoon crushed ginger
a few slices of cucumber
a small handful of spinach leaves
blend with a cup of coconut water
It’s brilliant!
Go and google ‘breakfast ideas’ and you’ll find image after image of bacon and eggs, toast, fruit, pancakes, waffles, bowls of cereal, cornflakes, muesli, muffins, French toast. Good grief, no wonder we have health issues. I’m not debating bacon and eggs – they’re a great paleo selection – sometimes. But they’re not the ONLY selection.
The ideal breakfast is fat, protein and fiber. Yes you CAN enjoy fat, protein and fibre in one highly efficient nutrient laden bowl that looks and feels like a typical breakfast bowl. And NOT look for food again until lunchtime.
Here’s how you do it!
Breakfast particularly needs to deliver the right nutrients to keep your blood sugars nice and steady for children as well as adults until lunchtime. It needs to deliver quality fats to keep your brain functioning and stop the stomach from growling. Adults need to stay alert and perform at work, kids need to deal with the stresses of school, learning and other kids. A high quality fatty breakfast is the ideal choice for them. Some of us are vegetarians or vegans and don’t like the idea of bacon and eggs or any of the other high protein recommended breakfasts. That’s why I like chia seeds.
Just a few facts about chia seeds:
They’re a whole grain food, are usually organic, non GMO, amazing source of omega 3, loaded with fibre, protein, micro nutrients and are known as one of the most nutritious foods on the planet!!!
HOWEVER
They need to be presoaked in order to get the best out of them. So now you’re probably thinking ‘I don’t have time to be bothered with putting chia seeds in my muesli if I need to wait a few hours to presoak them’. Here’s where my little video comes in handy.
In the video below I show you how to presoak a heap of these magnificent little foody powerhouses and keep them in the fridge at the ready for all the recipes you know you can enjoy with chia seeds. And the list is huge. I simply show one breakfast in this video, but you can add them to curries, smoothies, yoghurt, icecream – just make sure they’re soaked for long enough for them to get that gelatinous sloppy look.
Quick, Healthy breakfast from Anne Noonan on Vimeo.
Why is it better to simply NOT sprinkle them in our salads and through our smoothies and not bother to soak? Because, like a lot of seeds and grains, they absorb lots of moisture to be effective. If they do all that work in your gut, they rob the precious microbiome of essential hydration while they do their swelling in your gut which will mean some serious bloating and constipation issues for you. So always presoak first..
Recipe for coconut chia breakfast delight!
1 dessertspoon of gelatinous presoaked chia seeds (black or white seeds, your choice. Either way they’re great)
1 good sprinkle of mixed pepita and sunflower seeds (these can also be ‘dry fried’ to make them more toasty and taste great)
1 half a cup of mixed cranberries and dried blueberries
1 tablespoon of chopped walnuts
Pour 1 third cup of coconut milk over mix in the bowl and enjoy.
Optional:
Chopped fruit, drizzle of maple syrup or throw some blueberries on the top.
Did you enjoy that info? Make sure you PM me or email me on annen@tpg.com.au if you found it worthwhile or if you have questions or if you’d like to talk about getting your own health on track.
