Looking at what I put into my Body - Breakfast

If you are like most people, you get into somewhat of a eating pattern every day. You have your favorite cereal or breakfast in the morning, you either make or buy pretty much the same thing for lunch everyday, and you have a dinner routine. Casserole Mondays, Taco Tuesdays, Fried Chicken another day, maybe eat out on Friday's, you get the picture.

So For me breakfast was Total Cereal in the morning and toast. Looking at the box, it said 100% of your daily value of at least 11 vitamins’ and minerals in one serving. That sounded good. And wheat toast and margarine (not butter), that sounded healthy. I use skim milk so I knew I was going to start loosing weight with this breakfast… sounded good anyways.

My 1st mistake was NOT understanding what a “serving size” was. For Total cereal it is .75 cups (that’s ¾ of ONE CUP). I, of course, never measured my cereal and just poured it into my favorite big bowl. SO… when I finally started looking at these things, I found out that I was, in fact, pouring about FOUR servings into that bowl. Sure I was getting a whole bunch of vitamins and minerals, but your body can only take so much and you pretty much pee out the rest (makes your urine a pretty bright yellow). What I also failed to realize was the amount of CARBS I was putting into my body. Each serving is 22 grams of CARBS, so I was getting around 88 grams of CARBS just in the cereal I was eating. Add to that the two pieces of toast (22 g each slice), and the 2 cups of milk (11 g each cup) … jeeze, now I was up to over 154 g of carbs just in the morning. Generally speaking, you should “shoot” for about 30 – 60 carbs per meal depending on your age, gender, activity level, and a host of other stuff. Needless to say, 154 grams of carbs was NOT going to help me lose weight. But that doesn't mean carbs are bad for you. Read on…

Just a quick note on carbohydrates: Carbs are generally what your body uses to give you energy so you must eat foods with carbohydrates to even function. It’s just that any excess carbs are stored as fat. You need to keep a better watch how many grams of carbohydrates you eat each day.

Everyone has different carb needs. Reducing the amount of carbs you eat will help you lose weight because with a low amount of carbohydrate intake, your body uses all of the carbs instead of storing them and starts to burn what stored fat you already have for the energy it needs.

So I figured I should start with reducing the amount of carbs I eat each day and replace the big bowl of cereal with someone else. My current “favorite breakfast” is ½ large cantaloupe with a ½ cup of blueberries and coffee. ½ cantaloupe is about 7 grams of carbs and one ½ cup fresh blueberries is 9 grams carbs. That’s only 16 grams of carbs and it is all I can do to eat it all. I will also use ½ of a papaya from time to time instead of cantaloupe with about the same results. (But I add a little lime juice; it’s the only way to eat papaya). This also allows me to have a higher carb meal later in the day without bad results (but, I don’t go crazy with this)

So: Look at the number of carbs on the labels of the things you eat. See what foods you can substitute to help reduce the amount of carbs you eat without starving yourself, and look at your portion sizes on the labels. This will be a great start (and probably an “eye opener”) for a lot of people.

Of course just reducing carbs is NOT the only thing I am doing to reach my “one pound a week” weight loss goal, but is sure has helped. Nuff said today… enjoy breakfast….