Eating something first thing in the morning is important. After sleeping you are essentially coming off a mini “fast” from not eating for several hours. Your body and brain need fuel to get going. Too often it’s easy to run out of the house thinking you’ll just wait a few hours to have a good lunch. This means you are essentially running on fumes from whatever you ate the day before. While this isn’t going to hurt you once in a while, it certainly isn’t something you want to do on a regular basis.
The key is to pre-plan what you’ll have for breakfast, even preparing it the night before if needed. Then you can grab whatever you want to eat on the way out the door if that’s all you can do. I’ve struggled with the type of breakfast I should eat, mostly because I don’t like traditional American breakfast foods and much of it doesn’t agree with me. For instance, I rarely used to eat eggs because they could upset my stomach for the rest of the day. Pancakes and waffles just seemed like too much dessert and sugar first thing in the morning and I don’t eat gluten. Hash brown were alright except they are usually full of trans fats from frying. That left the traditional breakfast meats, sausage, bacon, ham, etc., that I didn’t eat. So my choices were limited in that realm.
Fortunately, eating fruit, oatmeal or a healthy cereal could work as long as I found a non-gluten variety. After doing a 30 day raw/vegan program I learned to start my day with either a green smoothie or citrus juice smoothie. Either are good but the citrus juice smoothie helps to stimulate the digestive track for the morning. It is hard to digest large amounts of food when you first get up which is why you might feel sluggish after a big breakfast. That’s the last thing you want to feel when you first get going; you want energy. Eating light in the morning can help you to have more energy and set up you for a good lunch, which should actually be the largest meal of the day. If you need to eat more because you won’t have access to a mid-morning snack or just need the calories, prepare oatmeal, a healthy granola or cereal. However, it is important to get some type of protein into your breakfast. I use a hemp protein powder and chia seeds in my smoothies for that.
If you have no problem digesting other breakfast foods, go for them, just don’t eat too much. On some mornings, I’ve grabbed a vegan veggie burger knowing I was having a big morning of travel and wouldn’t eat for a long time. Another option was to prepare foods to take with me to have throughout the morning until I could have a regular meal. Decide what works for your regular schedule but consider starting the day with a light but healthy breakfast that has a bit of protein.