I was a cross-country and track runner in high school. Despite the caloric load this particular activity — along with growing to my eventual adult size — entailed, my diet was atrocious, both in terms of content and pacing. I would barely eat all day before practice, then have a can of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli or a Celeste pizza-for-one upon arriving home, only to house an entire dinner a couple hours later. I’m not sure exactly how I ended up in this cycle, other than the 35-minute-long minimum commute to school crunching my morning, but I know one thing for sure: I almost never ate breakfast.
This pattern continued into my adult life. I rarely ate breakfast in college. As a young adult, I would often eschew any food until the early afternoon, when my body started to get weak. My poor exercise habits meant that my once ravenous appetite (the one that fueled those double meals following cross-country practice; did I mention we would sometimes go to Carl’s Jr. in the hour after class and house a burger before practice?) had long since disappeared. I didn’t get hungry anymore. I just got empty.
I’d read all the literature, the science about not back-loading your calories. It didn’t matter. I had settled into drinking coffee until the hole in my stomach demanded something solid. This may have had some bearing on other health issues.
One of the ancillary impacts of riding my bike as much as I have in the past few years is I suddenly could no longer get away without eating breakfast. I was genuinely hungry again, in a way I hadn’t remembered being since high school. That prompted me to take a whole new look at the way I was structuring my eating, as well as what I was putting in my body in the mornings.
We’ve been trained since childhood on those Folgers ads, the ones with the automatic coffee makers brewing pots at sunrise and quite literally waking people up. This has always seemed intuitively weird to me, and I generally didn’t actually consume any coffee until actually reaching the office. But it was still nearly always the first thing to hit my stomach each day.
Recent research has suggested that there is a good hormonal reason not to do this, because of the way our bodies release cortisol throughout the day. Because we’re already at a cortisol peak in the hour after waking up, dumping caffeine on top of that actually depresses our bodies’ production of it, and also builds our caffeine tolerance, something to which anyone who has progressed to multiple daily cups of coffee can likely attest. Years working in newsrooms have not been helpful, in this regard.
Some researchers have suggested waiting a full 90 minutes before ingesting caffeine, a habit that puts even more of an onus on eating breakfast. I’ve been doing this pretty consistently all year, and have found a number of changes. I no longer crave caffeine when I wake up, I’m generally more clear-headed than I used to be in the mornings, and I am often very, very hungry.
By using the fuel from breakfast to wake up and carry me through the early morning hours, when I actually do get around to my coffee (usually 2-3 hours after I first wake up), I only need one dose, and it helps me avoid the late afternoon crash that I used to power my way through with Five Hour Energy shots back when I worked in baseball. Do I sometimes still need an iced tea if I’m churning through a project or teaching class at night? Sure. But I’m not so wired I can’t sleep, and I’m also not starving come the evening.
As for what breakfast consists of, I generally follow my gut and mix it up depending on what I feel like I need. Sometimes that’s protein in the form of eggs, maybe with some sausage or avocado. If I want something a little lighter and sweeter, maybe some yogurt and granola (homemade — highly recommend this as a base recipe that you can tweak to your tastes). Maybe I’ll just have a grapefruit, sliced in half with a little sugar sprinkled on top. Sometimes, when I have time and I’m craving them, I’ll make pancakes, using one of a pair of recipes I’ll share in a future installment. Generally following what my body tells me it’s craving is a fool-proof way to go.
If I’m in a real hurry, as so many of us often are in the mornings, I might just blend up a quick smoothie. While these can take a nearly infinite variety of forms, there’s a really good, simple way to get some protein, some key vitamins, and to actually enjoy the taste of a green smoothie. This is a variation on an offering from South Block, a smoothie place at Union Market in D.C.
Actually Tasty Green Smoothie
½ cup frozen spinach
1 large banana
2 tablespoons peanut butter
8 ounces milk of choice
1 scoop protein powder (optional)
If adding protein powder, add milk, then powder to your blender first to prevent clumping. Add other ingredients and blend for 30 seconds.
The end result will likely be a pale green, with darker green specs of spinach within. But this will not taste like spinach. It will taste only like peanut butter. It’s an easy way to get you that banana, and a way to sneak in some extra protein, if you need it. Quick to make and easy to drink, there’s no excuse for not eating breakfast.
What are your go-to breakfast options?
Consistently eating a breakfast and getting a full night of sleep have been the two small life adjustments that I’ve made in the recent past that have had me feeling better than I realized I could. Each feels like a bit of a force multiplier on the rest of my day. (I can always tell these are because if I miss on either I’m feeling like absolutely garbage).