Are Breakfast Clichés Your Final Food Frontier? By Joan Kent, PhD

Are Breakfast Clichés Your Final Food Frontier?
By Joan Kent, PhD

I’ve written more than one book chapter discussing fruit as the “final frontier” in quitting sugar. But I’m coming to realize something else causes just as much resistance as fruit – and possibly more.

Breakfast.

Even people who are fully committed to healthful eating can be trapped in breakfast clichés.

In a recent coaching session, a client wanted to know what I eat for breakfast. I described the breakfast I’d had that morning, fairly typical for me. The meal was egg whites plus a salad that included kale, spinach, walnuts, real sauerkraut (for the probiotics), olive oil, and wine vinegar.

My client thought I was “doing something unusual,” yet I would disagree. I do exactly what I tell my clients to do – and follow the very same guidelines I recommend for them.

The thing is I do it in the morning, too.

Does Your Breakfast Look Like Dinner? Perfect!

There’s an unshakable idea that eating vegetables should be reserved for lunch and dinner. We seem to believe that breakfasts should resemble the familiar fare of our childhood.

Unfortunately, many of us grew up when no one ate healthful breakfasts. I certainly did.

Back then, standard breakfasts were pancakes, French toast or waffles. Cereal was always available. Not the healthy type, mind you – instead, it was the kind of cereal that inspired the comment, “You could get more nutrition from eating the box.”

Alternatively, there were eggs and toast, with or without bacon. Compared to the other options above, it would have been the wisest choice.

As the world’s foremost recovered sugar addict, I had a history of preferring the foods in the pancake grouping. Breakfast used to be my first chance of the day to eat white flour and/or sugar – don’t forget the syrup on the waffles! Those were truly the bad old days. But I digress.

Contemporary breakfasts still tend to resemble the traditional. They’ve just morphed a bit into “healthier” (or healthier-seeming) versions.

In many places – Scandinavian countries, Asian countries, midwestern U.S. states, and more – residents eat fish for breakfast. So who says a kale and spinach salad can’t be a morning meal? Or lentil soup and tofu? I used to make a terrific vegetable soup that my then-husband loved to eat first thing in the morning.

Breakfast does not have to look like a photo from the IHOP menu.

The most compliant clients I’ve ever had are bodybuilders. They’re so focused on results, they’ll eat whatever I recommend – and they certainly don’t care what time of day they eat it.

Addiction Will Make People Do Strange Stuff

Several years ago, I had a client who was quite addicted to fruit. In our in-person coaching sessions – and during any presentations of mine that he attended – this gentleman resisted my anti-fruit remarks with a cold, angry stare.

He also resisted my suggestions to switch to a breakfast that looked like a lunch or a dinner. No sandwiches or soup for him, thank you! He liked oatmeal.

During a phone coaching session, I finally discovered the real cause of his resistance. He said he planned to change his brand of oatmeal to one that was lower in fat.

Now, the fat content of oatmeal is fairly low and also pretty consistent from brand to brand. I immediately went to my kitchen. When I said that my brand of oatmeal had much less fat than his new replacement, he confessed the facts.

He wasn’t eating oatmeal for breakfast; he was eating granola.

As you probably know, granola contains nuts. The fat content listed on the label came mostly from the nuts.

But granola also contains dried fruit. And this client had lied in his food logs (and in our coaching sessions) to cover up the fruit consumption.

His resistance to a dinner-like breakfast didn’t come from clinging to breakfast clichés. It came from his fruit addiction.

I was entirely able to understand his addiction. Predictably, it took a while for him to decide to quit fruit. When he did give up fruit, his breakfasts started looking like lunches. He started losing weight more easily. And he stopped the angry stares.