Breakfast is essential for proper weight loss. With a nutritious meal in the morning, you’ll gain energy and won’t be tempted by calorific snacks during the day. There is no single recipe for a good diet breakfast. You can eat it sweet, savoury, or mix different ingredients according to your preferences. However, it will be very useful for you to know the basics and some tricks for preparing the perfect slimming breakfast.
Calorie content of a diet breakfast supporting weight loss
Breakfast should account for about 20-30 percent of your daily energy intake. It all depends on how many meals a day you are going to eat – so you can adjust it accordingly. If you are on a 2000 kcal diet, a 500 kcal breakfast will be perfect for you. A 1500 kcal diet requires a 375 kcal breakfast, etc. Manage your breakfast calories wisely, so that the meal is of real value. Be sure to learn the 7 steps and tricks that I, as a dietician, always use when devising recipes for diet breakfasts for both my patients and my own use.
Step 1: Choose a carbohydrate base for your breakfast
The classic slimming breakfast is primarily a dose of energy from complex carbohydrates. Although it is quite popular and sometimes justified to eat breakfasts rich in protein and fat, the vast majority of people feel better after a breakfast based on complex carbohydrates. Choose a source of “carbs” around which to build a good diet breakfast. They may include:
- oat flakes (preferably mountain oat flakes, as instant ones have a higher glycemic index),
- groats (e.g. millet groats, barley groats, bulgur),
- wholemeal bread and bakery products,
- whole grain tortillas,
- whole grain flour,
- whole grain rice or other carbohydrate addition you have left over from the previous day’s lunch.
Adjust the exact amount of carbohydrate base to the calorie content of your diet. Let carbohydrates account for 50-70 percent of the energy set for breakfast. If you’re aiming at a breakfast of 500 kcal, carbs can account for 350 kcal. This means the need to eat about 85 grams of carbohydrates in the first meal of the day. Of course, you don’t have to count it so precisely. However, treat complex carbohydrates as a basis of your slimming breakfast.
Step 2: Boost the protein in your breakfast
If you’re trying to lose weight, you probably know that it’s important to get enough protein in your meals, including breakfast. Let breakfast provide about 15-25 g of protein. It will then ensure satiety, protect muscles and add amino acids to the cells thirsty after a night’s fast.
Examples of protein additions for breakfast include: eggs, lean meat, cottage cheese, natural yogurt, ricotta, skyr, milk, hummus, plant-based soy and pea protein drinks (these are the only high-protein plant drinks), legumes, tofu, fish.
Step 3: Ensure that you get healthy fats
Breakfast does not have to provide a lot of fat, but remember that fats are also an essential part of a healthy diet. Make a habit of adding healthy sources of fat to all meals of the day, and you’ll make sure that vitamins A, D, E, K are always absorbed.
For breakfasts supporting weight loss, strictly control the supply of fat, because it is the most calorific macronutrient. It should be present, but in small amounts. An excellent fatty addition to sweet and savoury breakfasts is a spoonful of seeds or nuts.
Add a few almonds or walnuts to your oatmeal, and sprinkle your eggs with sesame seeds or your healthy breakfast sandwiches with black cumin seeds. Almost any breakfast recipe can be enhanced with the addition of healthy grains. Just use your creativity.
Step 4: An essential anti-inflammatory ingredient – a vegetable or fruit
When focusing on weight loss, don’t forget about the health-promoting factors in your diet. Even if it’s weight loss and low calorie content that are your priorities, it’s also important that meals are healthy and nutritious. Every balanced breakfast has a vegetable or fruit in it. All you need is approx. 150-200 g, i.e. a large tomato, pepper, a few radishes, a vegetable salad or fruit.
Fresh fruits and vegetables are a source of healthy and anti-inflammatory antioxidants. They should be distributed evenly in the diet to adequately support the body throughout the day. So don’t try to explain the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in your breakfast with the fact that you “make up” for it later in the day.
Step 5: Spice up your breakfast and use superfoods
Every moment of the day is good to add healthy superfoods to your menu. Superfoods is a conventional term; it has no fixed criteria or definition. The term is most often used to describe products that stand out with their strong health-promoting potential.
Use any of Polish superfruits: black currants, chokeberries, raspberries, blueberries or gooseberries.
For breakfast smoothies and oatmeal, powdered superfoods are perfect: powdered barley, bee pollen, matcha green tea, turmeric, spirulina, bran, cinnamon and cocoa.
Fresh sprouts, yeast flakes, hemp seeds, nuts, fresh herbs, seeds and grains will be perfect for all savoury breakfasts.
Step 6: Trick for a filling breakfast – boost its volume
A diet breakfast must satiate you for several long and demanding morning hours, but on a slimming diet you do not have a lot of calories. So all products that boost the volume of meals without adding many calories are worth their weight in gold.
The trick to increasing postprandial satiety is to add grated vegetables, which are neutral in taste. The real treasure of diet breakfasts are zucchini and carrots. They are appetizing but not very distinctive vegetables that will work anywhere and make a large, tasty and diet portion from a small one.
Grate the zucchini and carrots, and then:
- Add them to the oatmeal (yes, sweet oatmeal!). Carrots go perfectly with cinnamon and turmeric, and the aftertaste of zucchini will cover up the cocoa. You won’t even feel that there is a vegetable in your oatmeal.
- Add them to the mix for fit breakfast pancakes. If you’re making cottage cheese, oatmeal or banana pancakes, add a handful of zucchini or carrots to the mix, or a grated apple.
- Incorporate them into your salad. If you’re eating a salad for breakfast, add raw zucchini or carrots to it to increase its volume.
- Top off your skillet dishes with them. Zucchini, carrots and grated cauliflower will blend in with shakshouka or tofu scramble, whereas zucchini itself can also taste good with scrambled eggs.
Step 7: Pick a tasty addition to make your breakfast more enjoyable
To avoid getting bored with your diet, also take care of the taste and visual aspect of your meals. If you enjoy eating oatmeal with few additions, you are in the minority. All the flavour of this dish is provided by the multitude of ingredients. Ideally, most of them should be ultra-healthy, such as fruits, the grated vegetables mentioned in the previous section, and nuts.
However, you can “sneak” a typically recreational product into a healthy breakfast, such as a cube of chocolate (not necessarily dark!), a mini bar, a small handful of breakfast crisps, chocolate-covered nuts, or sesame seed candy. It’s not just about fit products with ideal ingredients. Put them on top of oatmeal, yoghurt with granola, or cottage cheese.
If it makes you more willing to eat a diet breakfast, it’s definitely worth it. A small amount of sweets in the diet does not spoil your efforts or the macronutrients of the meal while allowing you to maintain a healthy balance for your head. In a slimming process, it is not the perfection of one day or dish that counts, but persistence in resolutions.
Examples of diet breakfasts supporting weight loss
Here are 5 examples of product selection according to the scheme indicated above. Get inspired and also come up with your own compositions and proportions that suit you!
- Wholemeal rye bread + poached eggs + avocado + pepper + alfalfa sprouts + sriracha
- Millet flakes + milk + raspberries + almond flakes + cocoa + handful of grated zucchini + white chocolate cube
- Whole grain pancakes + cottage cheese with bee pollen + blueberries + ground flaxseed + wheat bran
- Whole grain tortilla + fried tofu + tomato + arugula + olives + black sesame
- Oat flakes + milk and skyr + orange + grated carrot + cinnamon + cloves + walnuts + grated dark chocolate