I write about breakfast a lot. My breakfast choices stray left of the cereal box. I eat meat muffins. And pumpkin with sardines. And stirfried sprouts with egg. And so I’m often met with the reaction: but that’s not what breakfast is meant to be, that’s not how breakfast goes?!

Isn’t it?

photo by Sarah Illenberger

I personally think that fat and protein are best at breakfast and that sugar should be avoided at all costs because it sets the day up for a rollercoaster ride of cravings. A protein-less breakfast leaves you unsatiated. And yet that’s the kind of start to the day we’ve been sold. Reader Dani alerted me to this article by Anneli Rufus. It’s a good succinct overview of a lot of material I read about how:

breakfast = dry cereal dripping in sugar in LARGE part because big corporations have sold us into believing such an equation.

But know this:

Breakfast foods are dictated by corporate interests + masturbation paranoia.

Breakfast is a much politicised meal. Rufus writes “Cold cereal, donuts and orange juice are now breakfast staples because somebody somewhere wanted money.”

• cereal as we know it was born out of a desire to produce something that would stop us masturbating!  Not. Kidding. Seeking to provide sanitarium patients with meatless anti-aphrodisiac breakfasts in 1894, surgeon and anti-masturbation activist John Kellogg developed the process of flaking cooked grains. Hence Corn Flakes. And Rice Crispies.
• in pre-Corn Flakes time, breakfast wasn’t cold or sweet. It was hot and hearty.
• pre-industry, we loaded up on protein-rich eggs, sausages, ham and belly-fat bacon along with ancient carb classics: mush, pancakes, bread.

I’m a big fan of Sally Fallon and her “bible” Nourishing Traditions (in fact it’s my all-time favourite manual…I VERY much recommend it). She’s an adherent to the Weston A Price way of living, which is similar to Paleo living, which is similar to how I eat (I’ve personally found it the best approach for my auto-immune issues).

photo via The Alkaline Sisters

Anyway, in a recent edition of WAP’s Wise Traditions Magazine (by Jen Allbritton), they ran a rundown on the best tricks for eating breakfast based on Sally’s principles. So I’ve shared a few below. I recently shared a post on how to eat breakfast without sugar and grains…this kinda builds on it. I know a stack of you were interested in reading more. Yeah?

5 Weston A Price breakfast tricks:

• fats and protein should be the featured nutrients, as they are critical for brain chemistry balance (these include egg, meat, fish, full fat dairy including yoghurt, kefir, nuts and seeds, coconut oil, butter, avocados).
• fruit, veggies, tubers and whole grains make a wonderful side note.
• make at least a portion of breakfast food easily digestible through soaking grains, or sour leavening, culturing dairy, fermenting fruits and vegetables.
• don’t rush. Relax through your morning meal.
• plan ahead.

Some breakfast favourites from fellow WAP foodies:

Sally Fallon: bake no-nitrate bacon in a pan with fruit (such as apple slices, apricot, peaches or nectarines, or with cherry tomatoes and mushrooms). Serve with eggs of any style – scrambled, fried. Enjoyed with a glass of raw milk. Breakfast tonic favourites include swedish bitters, beet kvass, cod liver oil, high vitamin butter oil mixed with warm water.

I could stare at that photo below for an inappropriately long time. It’s evocative and in-someone-else’s-moment-ish and makes me want to meet a man in trunks.

Mornings. Spent writing. Calmly. Alone. In sun. Yep.

I came across this rundown by Hunter S Thompson of his morning routine. Morning routine’s are key to life, I’ve come to learn. I’ve shared mine and others before. But this ode lifts my spirit:

“I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon;

anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast.

In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive:

As readers of this blog might know, I can’t do gluten or sugar, which makes breakfast tricky. If not toast or porridge or muesli or fruit, then what? Eggs. And more eggs.

zucchini ricotta cheesecake, via 101cookbooks

Not a sad predicament, but variety is required. Lately I’ve also been experimenting with cutting back on grains overall. I’m not wholly paleo (caveman diet follower); I tend to follow Weston A Price’s eating ideas (although not strictly). I can see merits in not eating so many carbs…doing so does curb my cravings…which I have problems with. I still eat carbs, just not as many.

So back to breakfast…no sugar, no gluten and… less grains. A challenge? Yes, but one I’m up for.

Tell me what you think of these ideas, and please add your own.

Zucchini Ricotta Cheesecake

This one is fresh from 101 Cookbooks. They used a springform pan, but you could use an equivalent baking dish or deep tart pan as well. I did mine in a skillet with less ingredients.

serves 8

• 2 cups zucchini, unpeeled & grated
• 1 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
• 2 1/2 cups ricotta cheese
• 1/2 cup freshly shredded Parmesan cheese
• 2 shallots, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/4 cup fresh dill, chopped
• zest of one lemon
• 2 large eggs, well beaten
• 1/3 cup goat cheese, crumbled
• drizzle of olive oil

Preheat oven to 170C degrees. Butter/oil a 7-inch springform pan.

In a strainer, toss the grated zucchini with the salt and let sit for ten minutes. Now aggressively squeeze and press out as much moisture as you can. Set aside.

Combine the ricotta cheese, Parmesan, shallots, garlic, dill and lemon zest. Stir in the eggs and mix. Now stir in the zucchini. Fill the pan with the mixture and place on a baking sheet and in the oven and for sixty minutes. Sprinkle with the goat cheese and return to the oven for another 20 -30 minutes or until the goat cheese is melted and the cake barely jiggles in the center (it will set up more as it cools).

Let cool five minutes, then release the cake from its pan. Serve at room temperature drizzled with a bit of olive oil and a few sprigs of dill.

Another week, another “study” that shows we’re meant to be eating this instead of that. Yeah, I tire of them. But I found this one on the best and worst foods for healthy weight quite interesting.

It found yoghurt was the best food to eat to lose weight.

Below I’ve outlined the gist of the study, and then shared my favourite ways to eat yoghurt.

via pinterest.com

The study was based on three trials over 20 years. It found

• The quality of food matters more than calorie count!!! So eating organic makes you lose weight.
• The top five most fattening foods were sugar-sweetened beverages, red meat and processed red meat, each associated with half a kilo of weight gain every four years.
• The most fattening food of them all?

I’ve been sugar-free for 16 days now. With a minuscule exception.** Huge. I’ve employed a range of tricks for quitting.

What’s been trickiest? Chocolate? Dessert? Nope. Breakfast.

Breakfast is dripping in sugar. Cereal, muesli, muffins, banana bread, fruit salad, yoghurt, jam, peanut butter. Even Promite!!! If you eat out or on the run, it’s worse. Try ordering even a porridge (in summer)… you have to specify no honey, no compote. And then it’ll come out drenched in low-fat yoghurt, which is brimful of sugar.

A tub of low-fat yoghurt (200ml) contains about 6-8 teaspoons of sugar. That stuff they serve at cafes? Even more…

Me, I’ve been mostly eating:

* poached eggs on toast, sometimes with bacon

* millet toast spread with cashew and turmeric spread from Suveran.

* avocado and vegemite on toast (gluten free)

* porridge “sweetened” with a little coconut milk and cinnamon, with yoghurt and nuts

* haloumi cheese grilled with sardines and olives

* smoothies made with a handful of frozen berries or a frozen banana…WHAT?! **Yes, bananas are full of sugar (berries are OK). But here’s the thing. My principles take over. I had 5 bananas in my freezer and given the shortage and given I don’t waste food ever (not even the stalks on spinach. Or sweet potato peel), I’ve been eating half at a time. My little bourgeouis experiment is not that important!

I’ve also been on the look-out for fruit and sugar-free muesli. I’ve posted a few below.

Other things to look out for:

* Chai tea – they often put honey or palm sugar in the mix

* drink full-fat milk with your coffee…the fat helps with sugar-cravings

* don’t drink juice. Veggie juice is ok, so long as it’s got no fruit juice in it (carrot and beetroot also contain a lot of sugar…be careful). A good substitute is coconut water.

* nuts are good! I eat a few after breakfast to curb the sugar grasp

But first.

I got David Gillespie, author of Sweet Poison,  to share his thoughts:

Sugar avoidance can eliminate whole food groups, not just chocolate and ice-cream. Take a walk down the breakfast cereal aisle and you will be struggling to find a single product that doesn’t have significant amounts of sugar.

Breakfast can be an enormous source of sugar in a ‘healthy’ diet.

Eating a heart foundation approved cereal (like Kellogg’s Just Right) and a glass of apple juice for breakfast will add up to almost half a kilo of sugar by the end of the week.

That’s half a kilo of sugar in your diet before you even push back from the breakfast bowl, before you crack open a chocolate wrapper and before you tuck into an energy drink at morning tea time.