Breakfast IS the most important meal of the day!

I've heard it and read it for years, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  You should never skip breakfast, yada, yada, yada...

In my adult life, I rarely ate a regular breakfast, unless we were going out to eat for breakfast or on vacation.  Since I've had kids (my oldest is 9 1/2) I've made sure to feed them breakfast of Oatmeal, pancakes, fruit, cereal, healthy things.  But I never sat down to eat breakfast.  Unless we went out and of course, if we went out to B'fast, I certainly didn't chose healthy things.

A few months ago, I was reading some more info and decided I would really give breakfast a good try.   For years, my breakfast has been a 24 ounce coffee and sometimes a donut on the go, to go with my hot drink.  But as the day would wear on, I would get jittery from the caffeine and blood sugar crashes, so bad that I would eat whatever I could get my hands on for lunch and it usually wasn't a good choice.  Then I'd find myself making up for more food around dinner time and making even worse choices.  It was a constant battle.  And even though I knew I should eat B'fast, it never occurred to me that if I did eat B'fast, that maybe the rest of my day could be more controlled than it had been.

So I did some research on how to best fill myself up in the morning to set my day up for the better.  I hate eggs.  But I decided to give them another try and found out that I really like eggs over easy or over medium.  So how best to fry and egg without really frying it?  I bought Olive Oil Spray Pam.  Then cooked the egg that way.  Very little oil, since it's a spray, so technically I don't consider the egg fried.  I found I really like the egg with a lot of fresh ground pepper.  But surely one egg is not enough.  More protein would be another option, but I really didn't want unhealthy bacon or sausage and I really like the veggie soy meat, so I opted for Morning Star Farms Veggie sausages (SO GOOD!) and then I figured I needed some sort of carb, but decided to aim for a complex carb instead of a heavily refined carb.  I ended up narrowing down my carb to Thomas's Whole Grain Lite English Muffins.  Oh, these are SO good.  But I didn't want it plain and I didn't want it with butter either.  So I did some more reading and found out that laughing cow lite cheese wedges sounded pretty good and ended up choosing the French Onion.  But I wanted something sweet too.  So I used the wedge on one side and then used Smuckers Simply Fruit on the other side, in raspberry.  This meal is so rounded for me that it satisfies me in ways I didn't know a breakfast could.  And sure enough, I felt great after eating this breakfast.  I wasn't as ravenously hungry at lunch time and I felt that I could make a much more reasonable decision for my lunch meal and that I wouldn't end up on a binge that I couldn't control.  And since I ate a decent lunch, I  felt I was better to plan a decent dinner too.  Especially if I made a conscious effort to snack sometime between lunch and dinner.  I found that I wanted to make my own dinner of chicken and veggies instead of picking up the phone and ordering pizza.  I'm not saying that I never gave into my binges, but this plan was working out a hell of a lot better for me than anything had in the last 10 years.  So I decided Breakfast was indeed the most important meal of the day.  If you get started right with the right filling foods, your body will have the fuel it needs to get started for the day.  Your stomach (and brain) will be filled with the right things propelling you (me) to make better decisions regarding other meals in the day. If I started off FEELING like I made great choices for breakfast, I felt like it was easier to set myself up with better meals for the rest of the day.

I've been eating B'fast like this for a few months.  I alter my meals around, substitute my English muffin for Oatmeal once in a while or a greek yogurt with fruit in place of the egg and I feel satisfied and full.  I'm grateful for finally figuring this out.  If I set myself up in the morning, the day usually ends up much better than it would be if I didn't set that first meal up.

Now that I'm on WW, my breakfast still holds me.  My breakfast is also my highest point meal of the day.  But it's so worth it.  I spend about 12 points on my breakfast.  That does sound high.  But I still have plenty of points left for the day, especially if I supplement with a large volume of healthy salad filled with tons of veggies (I usually use lettuce, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers with light or FF zesty italian dressing, I'll add fresh motz too) or a low point or the WW soup, before I eat my actual meal.  This ends up helping me a lot.  Normally, I'd be tempted to go back for 2nds on my entree and that's a big problem for me.  But if I eat my soup or salad first, before my entree, then I'm full and mostly satisfied and less likely to go back for seconds.  And since veggies are NO points on WW, if I am hungry and want more, go back for another salad!

I'm still at the top of my journey to lose weight, but this is something that has really become apparent to me in the last two weeks, that breakfast means more than ever if it's going to help curb my appetite for the rest of the day and lead me to make better choices.