Which breakfast food will give me the most energy for the day?
This blog is about taking on new habits that could be life-transforming. Honestly I don’t really know what that is exactly. So I’m just going to try some things. It seems logical to me to start by looking first at the beginning, my morning routine.
What should I eat in order to maximize my energy in the morning after breakfast?
That’s the question I was thinking about when I started my morning breakfast experiments. I wanted to try several different foods to see which one made me feel better at work in the morning. The only criteria I was going use to judge my results was how I felt. I’m sure that “how I feel” is a scientific criteria for judging your breakfast choices but that’s what I was going to use. Sometimes when I got to work, after eating breakfast at home, I was starving as soon as I got there. This is what I wanted to get away from. I wanted to feel good and not be hungry when I got to work.
Eating for energy.
My typical routine for breakfast is to eat a bowl of cereal and have a cup of coffee as quickly as possible. Typically the choices were Cheerios, Life or Raisin Bran. I did have a streak that I ate oatmeal everyday for 30 days. But now my plan was to eat something different everyday and pay attention to how I felt when I got to work. What will my energy levels feel like. How did I feel.
My breakfast test went as follows:
Monday: Raisin Bran
Tuesday: Instant Oatmeal
Wednesday: Life Cereal
Thursday: Cinnamon Toast
Friday: Fried egg on flour tortilla with American cheese
Saturday: ?
Sunday: ?
These are fairly typical choices for me for breakfast. Usually my breakfast would consist of a bowl of cereal. I would pick one kind of cereal raisin bran or Life cereal and eat it for a 30 day period. I didn’t want to make decisions about what to have for breakfast so I chose one thing and stick to it for a period of time. I have no idea what other people do but that’s what I do.
When the weekend came I had to work Saturday and Sunday, but I was running out of ideas for breakfast.
It occurred to me that what I was doing wasn’t quite the right approach. I was only making an incremental change in my morning routine. The kind of new habit I was looking for had to be transformational.
Then I remembered something that I had heard a number of people say. They said they drink a glass of water first thing in the morning. I never heard an explanation as to why they were drinking the water accept for hydration. The idea didn’t appeal to me, I wouldn’t want to go to the bathroom so often. Nevertheless when Saturday came along I decided to try Drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning with nothing else. Water only.
Water Only?
In the last 20 years I have never, considered not eating breakfast before I went to work. I always ate something before I went to work.
Saturday: Water
Everyday I was paying attention to how I felt when I got to work, was I hungry or not? Did I feel energetic or not? Was my mind clear or not? Of course there can be other factors that affect these issues but I just considered the food.
So which breakfast do you think make me feel best?
If you guessed anything other than water, Saturday’s breakfast, you would have be wrong.
I was surprised. Sunday I did the same thing, water only.
The results were the same. I liked the way I felt.
For the following week, every morning, I drank just water. Everyday verified that I felt better not putting food in my belly first thing in the morning.
I want to pause here and consider our “new habit” criteria. Can I consider this a transformational habit? Would you think so?
I think I will save the details of what I learned for another post, for now I’m no longer eating breakfast in my traditional way. I only drink a glass of water.
Till next time, happy habits
– Jim