Morning People

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath for me to tell you about what I eat for breakfast, right?  Well today is your lucky day!

Let me start by saying that I have not always been a morning person. In fact, that may be an understatement. From the time I was a baby, it was a basic rule of thumb to let sleeping Lori's lie or face the extremely grouchy consequences. When I was a teenager I would sleep til noon when given the chance, and a solid 10-11 hours of sleep was not uncommon for me. I even perfected the skill of sleeping through my alarm - not hitting the snooze button, mind you, but a full on blaring alarm. My record in undergrad was 45 minutes.  For much of my life I was convinced that "morning people" were either moderately insane or victims of some unfortunate sleep disorder, but either way it was something you were born with, and obviously not something that would ever apply to me.

So while I still need 8-9 hours to be a productive human being, Kevin's schedule of early to bed (9:30 or 10 most nights) and early to rise (5:30 for him/6:30 for me) has made me into a morning person, which I resisted at first, but now I love!  It's a great feeling to start the day with a workout and still have plenty of time to leisurely answer emails and get to work.

Before I became a morning person, breakfast was at most an afterthought, but more often I would skip it entirely save for the occasional brunch on the weekends.  That's right, I spent many years skipping THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY!!!

But when you wake up at 6:30 and work out most mornings, breakfast is a must, so much so that I have two breakfasts! I'm a creature of habit, so I eat basically the same thing every day.  First, right when I wake up I eat my version of the Marsha McKinley breakfast: 1 slice of sprouted grain toast with 1 Tbsp peanut butter (Jennifer Reese's Make the Bread, Buy the Butter inspired to make it myself) and half a cup of soy milk (who me, OCD?):

Then I take my little snack back to bed with me to check email and do a little work before I run.  Believe me, Kevin very much prefers the toast to my previous "first breakfast" which involved me eating dry Raisin Bran out of a measuring cup (and getting bran flakes all over our bed).

After my workout I make my Brian McKinley breakfast: a smoothie.  The exact recipe has evolved over the past few months, but the current incarnation is protein-packed:

From left to right: baby kale/spinach/chard mix, frozen strawberries,
blueberries, unsweetened soymilk, flax seed and almond butter

Everyone has their own preference about how thick/sweet/etc they like their smoothies to be, so my proportions may not work for everyone but I usually use:

1/2 cup soymilk

1 cup frozen strawberries

1/2 cup blueberries

2 tsp ground flax seeds

1 Tbsp almond butter (the main reason I started adding almond butter was because I bought a jar to try on my toast instead of peanut butter and realized I can't stand the taste all on it's own - but it's great in a smoothie!)

1 cup greens (I experimented with different greens and found that this "baby greens" mix from TJs allows me to avoid the overpowering flavor of lacinato kale or other "mature" greens)

Add everything to my trusty old blender and let 'er rip:

The end result is an interesting intersection of green, red and purple on the color wheel, but it tastes good and gets me 2+ servings of fruit, a serving of greens, calcium and protein from the soymilk and almond butter and omega-3s from the flax!  

I will say that I initially used orange juice for another serving of fruit (and because it makes the smoothies sweeter), but it doesn't have the protein of soymilk and the brand we buy is not calcium fortified so I made the swap when I started tracking nutrients. I also learned that there are these round orange things that said juice originates from, and started to eat those instead.