4 Ways to Make Breakfast Easier, Healthier, and Yummier (While Staying Paleo)
Recent question from a reader:
I’m relatively new to Paleo, and it’s really hard for me to find time to cook in the morning. What are good Paleo breakfasts that I can eat?
Finding Healthy Breakfast Foods is HARD
This is a very common and popular question.
When I speak to major corporations, it’s one of the most common questions I hear at the end of my talks.
But as you can guess, there isn’t a secret. There aren’t certain foods that some of us secretly know about and keep to ourselves.
However, there are several tips and tricks that make the first meal of the day easier:
1. Eat Non-Breakfast Foods. If you’re eating breakfast at home, it’s actually remarkably easy to get used to eating “non-breakfast” leftovers for breakfast. In other words, start eating whatever you had for dinner or lunch the day before so that you don’t have to cook something new.
I routinely have stir-fried beef, pulled pork, stir-fried veggies, or any other number of typical dinner dishes for breakfast. Re-heating is your best friend in the morning.
2. Try Intermittent Fasting. A lot of people (myself included) do very well skipping breakfast. This tends to be a lot harder for women, although my fiancee loves it.
We feel more productive and less worried about food now that we rarely eat for the first 4-5 hours that we’re awake.
When I say intermittent fasting, all I’m talking about is restricting your eating to an 8-9 hour window every day. Usually, that means not eating until lunch and then eating during the 8 hours after lunch.
This is a bit of “trick” answer, since it technically means cutting out breakfast, but it’s a healthy and easy way to make sure that you don’t eat junk in the morning.
3. Prepare Ahead of Time. You’re going to be tired in the morning. And often rushed.
So don’t be surprised. When I was still eating breakfast (and before I moved to leftovers), I’d boil a bunch of eggs (12-18 at a time), refrigerate them, and then eat 2-3 every morning. Or I’d buy some deli meat (salami, ham, etc.) and eat that.
I’d eat pretty much anything that didn’t require cooking in the morning, since I rarely had time or energy to cook.
4. Learn to Love Omelets. On those occasions that I had to grab something on the way to work, it was almost always an omelet. It wasn’t ideal in the sense that it was cooked in vegetable oil, but it’s not a bad choice if you need something that you can find in a lot of small diners and cafes.
As I mentioned above, there are no secret foods that you just haven’t heard about. However, I know that these 4 tips have helped many, many people deal better with the first few hours after waking up.
Images: Copyright (c) SunnyS from Fotolia and FomaA from Fotolia