Breakfast for Weight Loss and Long Term Health

Indeed, breakfast is the most important meal. It is the first dose of nourishment that the body gets after a long wait (8-12 hrs) and it provides us with energy to meet the challenges of the day. After 12 hrs long wait, breakfast is the perfect meal where we can provide nutritious food to our body. You should prepare breakfast in a way that it provides you with an awesome dose of both macro (carbs, protein, fiber, fat) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc). It also should enable fast natural weight loss by keeping you feel fuller for a longer time and stop you from craving for more until before lunch.

So with this in mind, I explored and experimented with different breakfast options recommended by many but could not find something where I can say “Yeah! That’s an awesome breakfast”. So I started going through lots of materials to discover the best breakfast for weight loss in the world. It took a lot of time but in the end I was able to create one and I am very excited to share it with you. Let’s take a look, shall we?

The Criteria for The Best Breakfast for Weight loss

In this modern world we are facing challenges one after another, after some research I identified 15 different criteria for a breakfast. The breakfast must meet these criteria for it to be the best. The best breakfast should:

• Provide us with a good amount of energy
• It should contain a good dose of protein, fiber, and good fat
• Provide a good dose of micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants)
• Enable natural weight loss
• Be easy to prepare
• Be tasty to everyone (including kids)
• Easy to digest with little effort
• Allow using ingredients creatively
• Stop us from craving for junk foods (e.g. chocolates)
• Be free from artificial sugar like Truvia
• Be free from processed foods
• Be flexible to vary its ingredients
• Be gluten-free or really low gluten
• It should meet the daily requirement of fruits and vegetables
• Be vegan (so that everyone can eat)

These huge list of requirements ruled out many of the breakfasts we eat every day like cereals (main reason – high on artificial sugar) and breads (main reason – gluten content). Out of over 50 breakfasts I tried and read about only one met the criteria. What it might be? I hope you are curiously wondering. let’s take a look.

Ingredients of this Breakfast

Below is the list of ingredients which will be used in our best breakfast. It is called Choco Fruity Porridge. However, don’t get mislead by the name, there is much more to it.

• Oat Bran is the best grain among all the grains and hence it makes sense to use it in the best breakfast and we are doing so. Alternatives: Rolled oats or cereal flakes which are low on sugar.
• Non Dairy Milk for example almond or soy milk. Alternatives: Water, Dairy milk. Yes, water may reduce the taste little bit but it is a good alternative. If you prefer dairy milk over water, you can use it but it is not the recommended option.
• Fruits hat contain high fibre and low calorie like Apple, Kiwi, Pear, Blueberries. You can choose any combination of fruits as you like but keep an eye on each of their calories because we don’t want to eat too much in one go. Any fruit with less than 100 calories per 100 grams is a good option. This rules out fruits like banana and avocado (these are great fruits and you can still use them once in a while).
• High Fibre Vegetables with a sweet taste like Sweet Potato, Carrot, Frozen Peas, Frozen non-GMO Corn. Many people get turned off by use of vegetables in a breakfast meal which includes fruits as well. However, as we will be blending the sweetish vegetables with fruits to make a fine paste, this option is not as radical as it sounds. This concept of mixing vegetables with fruits is not new – lot of retailers are bringing out smoothies with such combinations all around the world. More about benefits of this later on.
• Nuts almond/cashew/pistachio pieces and flaxseed powder. Flaxseed must be a critical ingredient as it is the best seed out there. You can also use other nuts and seeds as you prefer. I have taken almonds as an example here.
• Cocoa Powder This probably is the best ingredient of this breakfast. It contain good amount of fibre and protein, it also give the chocolate flavour which will attract kids. As this is the only ingredient which makes the dark chocolate healthy adding this to your breakfast removes the need for you to buy a (dark) chocolate ever again. Yay! Happy Teeth!

The Recipe of the Breakfast

OK, We now have everything we need. Let us go ahead and make the breakfast.

• Step 1: Heat the milk in the microwave or on a hob for few minutes.
• Step 2: After the temperature rise sufficiently, transfer it into a relatively big vessel (big enough to mixing all ingredients).
• Step 3: Add the oat bran (or whichever grain flakes) into it and mix it slowly to remove all the lumps and keep it aside for 15-30 minutes. Keep it longer if you want the mix to be thicker.
• Step 4:  Grind small pieces of apple, carrot and kiwi along with heated frozen peas in to a paste using a blender. (Note: if you use normal peas you might have to boil them before blending)
• Step 5: Mix this paste with flaxseed and cocoa powder into the oat bran paste and mix it well.
• Step 6: Now add the blueberry and broken nuts on top and your breakfast is ready for serving. You don’t need to blend those fruits/veggies/nuts which you like more than others and want to feel them as you eat. Note: For small kids without teeth, you can add these to the blender as well.

How this breakfast help you achieve natural weight loss and long term health?

Well, most breakfasts we commonly eat today is mainly based on grain. Because of this they have high calorie to weight ratio (around 250-350 calories per 100). But in our case comes down to 126 calories per 100 grams.

We achieve this by making vegetables and fruits take up bigger portion of the meal (for example 100 grams of carrots increases the total calorie of the breakfast by just 42 calories). By adopting this tactic you can consume more breakfast and still don’t need to worry about weight gain. As weight loss is all about calories in minus calories out, this will indeed greatly help in reducing your weight.

The other problem with grain based breakfasts are that they lack in variety of micro-nutrients like (vitamins and minerals) due to lower portion of fruits and vegetables in them. So by adding plenty of fruits and vegetables provides you will get different micro nutrients.  Don’t forget that we need around 9 to 10 different varieties of vegetables and fruits (more vegetables than fruits) to be eaten everyday to achieve long term health and this breakfast definitely help us with a good head start. Because you nearly meets 50% of our target with just one breakfast. We however need to ensure that we use different fruits and vegetables everyday to consistently meet this goal.

With normal grain based breakfast you won’t get more than 3 variety of vegetables or fruits and there is a good chance that we fail to meet the fruits and vegetable requirement of the day.

Finally, as most of the ingredients used are really great foods and as they are used in their raw form with little or no processing, you can get the most of its nutrition. Each food used will have its own long list of benefits and hence I don’t want to expand benefits of each of them here. However, I do want to stress a bit about cocoa powder.

Cocoa powder is the best ingredient in this breakfast not because of the awesome fibre and protein it has but also due to the rich antioxidant content it offers.

It is a super awesome powder and I highly recommend using it. The only problem with the powder is that it is difficult to consume on its own as it has slightly bitter taste. However, given that this breakfast is already loaded with natural sugar you can make use of the opportunity to get some cocoa into the body. It is one of the best antioxidants out there anyway. It obviously have an overpowering chocolaty flavour and hence kids will surely love it

Final Words

I believe this breakfast easily achieves all the criteria that I set for breakfast to be the best. While I have not taken the effort to justify it here, I hope this article addresses each point directly or indirectly.