Personally, I love breakfast. It kickstarts your metabolism and keeps you full and awake until lunch. If you're trying to cut inches from your waistline, it really is the most important meal of the day. Unfortunately, it’s really easy to sneak unwanted calories into your morning meal, so it's important to be aware of what you may be eating.. Do any of these foods sound familiar?
- Bread and bagels. Whole wheat toast isn’t a sin. It’s always the refined sugars that are the real culprit. But as far as bagels go, they’re a carb overload no matter how you slice it. The whole grain ones are better, but you’re still getting something like ten servings’ worth of carbs in one meal.
- Bacon and sausage. Meat protein can be great for you when it comes from the right sources, but bacon and sausage are about as wrong as it gets. They’re processed and full of saturated fat and cholesterol. And what’s worse, studies have found that eating processed meat increases your mortality by 44 percent!
- Sugary breakfast cereal. Sugary cereals, like bagels, are an enormous source of empty carbs. Not only that, but they’re full of added sugars and don’t offer barely any nutritional value. The Environmental Working Group said in 2014 that children who eat sugary cereal every day will eat ten pounds of sugar in a year from the cereal alone.
- Pastries and muffins. This coffeeshop fare is about as bad for you as you’d expect. These baked goods are full of added sugars and refined flours, and eating them means you’re eating hundreds of sugary calories that will just leave you hungry in a couple of hours.
- Fruit juices. If there’s one way to suck all of the health out of fruit, this is it. Fruit juices get rid of a lot of the fibers and other nutrients that make fruit so good for you, and instead add sugar to make a drink that’s almost as sugary as sodas.
- Coffee drinks. We’re not talking about black coffee or a shot of espresso, we’re talking about the stuff you add in. This includes sugar, creamer, cocoa powder, whatever you need to make your coffee or espresso taste palatable to you. These additives take this basically no-calorie caffeine shot and turn it into a mess of sugar and fat. Even if you do drink coffee, make sure you eat a high-protein breakfast to go with it.
##MN_RESP##
So what can you eat? Proteins like egg whites, turkey and turkey bacon, and veggies (in your eggs!) make for a nutritious, protein-filled breakfast. Fibrous fruits are great as well, and paired with plain yogurt they’re even better.
What’s your favorite healthy breakfast?
Photo Copyright © 2011 cookbookman17/Flickr
