If you’re not a morning person, you most likely have a love-hate relationship with breakfast on workdays. You realize you should probably eat something a little more substantial than a large coffee and a couple grapes, but most of the time you can’t be bothered. Your body has adapted to not eating breakfast, so it’s fine, right?
Well, not really. The first thing you eat every day is actually kind of important. It’s a good opportunity to jump start your metabolism with a portion of your daily nutritional needs and set your self up to make healthier choices for the rest of the day. Not to mention, you’ll have more energy if you eat a well-rounded breakfast instead of loading up on caffeine. So how do you fit breakfast into your morning routine? Here’s a few tips that will change your attitude towards the first meal of the day.
Plan ahead
If you’re the type of person who has their morning routine down to a science in order to steal every single minute of sleep possible, it can help a lot to plan your breakfast the night before. Look online for recipes for things like overnight oats and smoothies where you can do all the prep work before you go to bed and just heat up or pop the ingredients into the blender in the morning. If you’ve already laid out a plan for a healthy breakfast and done all the prep work, you’ll be a lot less likely to say forget it and just grab a huge bagel loaded with cream cheese on your way to work.
Keep it simple
If you’re not a morning person, don’t try to force yourself to cook a huge meal in the AM. Save the omelettes and avocado toast with a fried egg on top for the weekend and stick to things like yogurt and fruit, oatmeal, boiled eggs, and smoothies for work days. The most important part of any breakfast is the protein, so choose that first and then build the rest of your meal around it. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just needs to give you the energy you need to get through to lunch without raiding the office kitchen for donuts, croissants, and any other treats that might be available.
Abstain from late-night snacking
Getting into the habit of not eating after dinner will guarantee that by the time you wake up in the morning, you’re hungry enough for something more substantial than a cup of coffee. Studies have also shown that eating late at night can cause weight gain both because you probably aren’t choosing the healthiest snacks and your body is more likely to store those calories as fat instead of burning them for energy. Makes sense considering your body processes slow down when you sleep. Eating late at night can also have an impact on the quality of your sleep, leading to you not wanting to get up as early to make breakfast, and the cycle continues.
Save coffee for later
The first thing you drink in the morning shouldn’t be a cup of coffee—it should be a big glass of water. No one is saying you can’t have your coffee at all, but shifting the time to after you’ve hydrated and eaten is a simple way to both reduce the amount of caffeine you’re consuming daily, and allow your body to focus on digesting breakfast first. Coffee is also an appetite suppressant, so if you drink coffee first thing, you probably don’t even want breakfast, which is exactly the feeling you should be trying to avoid.
Don’t rush it
As much as you don’t want to hear it, making time for breakfast in the morning is probably going to mean getting up a little bit earlier than you were before. Even with simple breakfast options that you plan the night before, you still have to factor in the time it takes to eat. You don’t want to be inhaling your food while you rush to get ready for work, so giving yourself a little cushion of time is essential. Try to enjoy your meal too. It will take a week or two to adjust, but once you’re into a good routine, getting up twenty minutes earlier won’t be the struggle you expect it to be any more.
