Pamela Hernandez owns Thrive Personal Fitness in Springfield, MO where she focuses on weight training for weight loss. She writes a blog for her web site, www.thrivepersonalfitness.com, sharing vegetarian recipes from her kitchen, exercise strategies, lifestyle tips and stories from her own journey. You can also follow Pamela on Twitter @ThriveFit or pick up more tips on Facebook, www.facebook.com/thrivepersonalfitness.

Breakfast seems to be is the most challenging meal of the day. We want to sleep as long as possible and shoot out the door to arrive at work or school right on the dot. There is often a corralling of kids, pets and spouses that has to happen to get out the door as well. With all of the chaos the most important meal of the day seems to escapes us. Coffee becomes the de facto substitute for solid food and by lunch time the grumbling in the tummy makes anything and everything look good. This leads to overindulgence at lunch and, perhaps, the rest of the day.

When it comes to fat loss, breakfast really can be the most important meal of the day. Data from the National Weight Control Registry shows that eating breakfast every day is the habit of 78% of their successful “losers”. The reason for this is twofold: After fasting for the previous 10-12 hours you need fuel to get your metabolism moving again. It keeps you from going into starvation mode and overeating later in the day.

Yet the obstacles to cooking a nutritious breakfast each morning probably aren’t going anywhere.

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Kellogg’s Honey Smacks cereal is over 50 percent sugar by weight, putting them at the top of Environmental Working Group’s list of the ten worst cereals. The organization, dedicated to protecting children’s health, analyzed 84 popular brands, finding that only one in four brands meet appropriate nutrition guidelines for children.

The Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children was formed by Congress in response to rising levels of childhood obesity. The group is exploring the possibility of setting advertising standards for foods with high levels of sugar, salt and fat. However, lobbyists are fighting back on behalf of cereal manufacturers, who spend millions on marketing sugary breakfast foods to parents and kids alike. Currently, the industry has set a voluntary standard for the sugar content of cereal by weight at 38 percent, while the USDA recommends a limit of 26 percent.

After Honey Smacks, sugar also accounted for more than half of Post Golden Crisp’s weight, but were closely followed by three Quaker Oats products. “The cereals on the list are relatively higher in sugar because the sugar is reported as a percentage of the cereals’ weight,” commented Registered Dietitian Mary Hartley. “Since these cereals are light and airy, there have relatively more sugar by weight.” However, when kids eat sugary cereal, they’re missing out on more important nutrients. “The main problem with sugar for healthy people is that it ‘displaces calories’ from foods that contain nutrients – vitamins, minerals, fibers, compounds with antioxidant activity, etc. – replacing those calories with a food that contains only energy from carbohydrate,” said Hartley.

“I was stunned to discover just how much sugar comes in a box of children’s cereal,” said Environmental Working Group’s Senior Vice President of Research Jane Houlihan. “The bottom line: most parents would never serve dessert for breakfast, but many children’s cereals have just as much sugar, or more.”

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By Melissa Breyer for Care2.com

How would you like to meet your daily sodium and saturated fat allowance, as well as nearly half of your daily calorie needs, in one quick breakfast eaten on the road? It’s becoming progressively easy these day as food technicians, chefs and market researchers, holed away in corporate fast food “studios,” are busy developing monstrous new breakfast items. Trying to claim as much of the $57 billion fast food breakfast market as they can, the fast food giants are drumming up increasingly cheesy, steak-y, fried chicken-y breakfast dishes that tap into flavor combinations that have proven successful for lunch and dinner items. It’s no longer eggs and English muffins for fast food breakfast…breakfast burger anyone?

What’s most striking about some of these high-calorie items–aside from the unsustainable, industrial, often GMO and synthetic ingredients–is the very high sodium and saturated fat content. According to the USDA, the current recommendation for sodium consumption is less than 2,300 milligrams a day. For saturated fat, the maximum allowance is between 18 grams to 31 grams, depending on your caloric intake needs. (You can calculate your caloric need with this calculator from the Mayo Clinic.) Many of these breakfast items meet or exceed the daily sodium and fat allowances, and provide much more than one-third of your daily caloric needs.

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By Karen Sherwood for NutritiousAmerica.com

These early fall mornings all we want to do is crawl back under our warm covers and sleep for an hour longer. Late, we usually run out the door forgetting the most important meal of the day: breakfast.

We’ve all been told the statistics about how breakfast ignites the metabolism (literally breaking the fast) and how skipping breakfast is associated with obesity; but when we are late for work and still half-asleep statistics are easily ignored. As are nutrition labels. So when we don’t skip, we grab something unhealthy but convenient that puts us at a nutritional disadvantage all day.

But don’t stress. You can still hit the snooze button. You can still run out of the door at the last second possible. We at Nutritious America will keep it simple. We will review three convenience-type breakfast products and give you some healthy, also convenient, alternatives.
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Muffins are one of those things we quickly give up when we start watching our weight. And for good reason. Some the size of a softball made with starchy white flour, butter, loads of sugar, and likely some syrupy canned version of what used to be fruit combine to make a breakfast that will have you crashing before you can wash it down with coffee. Or, there are Van’s muffins. If you need a muffin fix, then reach for these.

Found in the frozen natural foods section at most major grocery stores (we’ve found ours at Super Target and Kroger), these make a nice addition to a balanced breakfast. We actually prefer them as dessert.

The best part is, it’s not a softball-sized muffin. It’s actually the best part of the muffin – the muffin tops, or as Van’s calls them, muffin crowns. In a portion-crazed world, these are just right for a quick breakfast, a snack, or a dessert.
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