Quick Breakfast Recipe to Change Your Mornings

This quick breakfast recipe will change your mornings. Now, I am no chef so this is not going to be complicated. It is the productivity coach version of a perfect recipe.

Breakfast literally “breaks” the “fast” of not eating while you were asleep. The first meal of the morning replenishes your body’s supply of glucose, which in turn boosts your energy level and alertness.

You know breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Your mothers told you. Health teachers told you in school. Every magazine article on health told you. Yet it is often skipped in favor of coffee or extra sleep.

There are very few things I will insist a client include in her morning routine, but breakfast is one of them. I get some pushback, but this recipe contradicts each of the arguments against breakfast. I will give you an example of a challenge in each of the pillars of Sustainable Productivity – Health & Fitness, Mental Well-being, and Physical Environment.

Health & Fitness

Argument: I don’t have the ingredients.

No big deal – just dice whatever veggies you do have. Just a couple handfuls. No veggies? Toss in a few herbs. Doesn’t really even matter what – oregano, dill, garlic, even rosemary. Just a pinch of each.

I think cheese makes everything better so I always top off each cup with cheese. You can leave it off if you are lactose intolerant or not a cheese fan. I recently made these and did not have shredded cheddar cheese so I just tore apart pieces of sliced Colby. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It did not look pretty before it went into the oven, but it sure came out delicious!

Mental Well-being

Argument: I don’t have time to cook in the morning.

I have a solution for you. Knock out a batch of this quick breakfast recipe on Sunday, and you have 2 egg bites ready for every day of the work week (plus 2 for the freezer for another week). If you add breakfast meat you will get even more egg bites out of each batch. Last weekend the grocery store had Boston butt on sale so Bixby got one and made chorizo. After mixing in a bit of chorizo, I had 20 egg bites instead of the usual 12. More for the freezer for a future week when I don’t even have 20 minutes to make a batch of bites.

Physical Environment

Argument: I am not hungry in the morning.

Brilliant! These puppies will travel wherever you go. They are good cold if you don’t have a way to heat them up once you get to your destination. The flexibility of this breakfast will be good for wherever you are – home, the car, the office, or school!

There is no excuse for skipping breakfast. This quick recipe can change your mornings with just a short amount of prep. Here are the bones of the recipe. Mix it up and make it your own!

Quick and Easy Egg Bites

12 eggs

1/2 cup milk

vegetables

cheese

crumbled breakfast meat

Mix together and cook in muffin pan (don’t use wrappers) for 20-25 minutes on 375 degrees.

By |2020-09-13T17:19:09-04:00September 15th, 2020|Health & Fitness|0 Comments

Morning Routines – Learn from My Top Four Mistakes

One of the questions I get most often is about morning routines. Which makes sense because you can’t swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting someone promoting their morning routine. Side note: Yes, this is the WORST idiom in English, yet I cannot stop myself from using it more often that I would like to admit. 

Anyway, this question about morning routines also makes sense in ways that are less harmful to felines. In society these days the pace of our mornings is unsustainable and research shows that so goes our morning, goes our whole day. If you have an unsustainable pace of morning, this leads to an overall unsustainable you. 

I want to share my early morning routine misses with you with the intention of helping you avoid these landmines. In the following weeks, we will take a closer look at each of the mistakes I made and how I corrected them to be a sustainable part of my day. But first we need to look at what went wrong. 

Lessons Learned from My Morning Routine Attempts

1 – Our morning routine

In my head my morning routine morphed into OUR MORNING ROUTINE. For example, part of my morning routine was to make the bed. I ran into issues when it was time to do this part of my routine (see #4 about rigidity), and Bixby was still in the bed. My solution was to make a rule: Last one out makes the bed. 

This happened about three times. Over the course of a year. And man was I GRUMPY about that success rate. Did he not understand the rule? Did he not hear me? Turns out part of the problem is that he scores as a Rebel within Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies framework, but generally he just didn’t care about the made bed. 

He also saw the making of the bed as my thing. When I get out of a bed, it looks like a tornado hit it. When he gets out of the bed, he can grab the corner of the covers with 2 fingers and daintily fold the cover back into place. He considered the whole thing my problem.

unmade bed
I bet you can figure out which side is mine!

2 – Sweeping changes

When I first started working out my morning routine, I made all kinds of declarations and moratoriums. I made a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish in my Dream Morning. Then I time boxed it, clearly not having read my own post about what a mistake that was going to be. Then I completed the whole list exactly once. Ever. 

3 – Everything is a priority

One of the main reasons I only completed the whole routine once is that is was LONG – like almost two hours. Mama ain’t got time for that! I gotta go bring home the bacon! The problem is that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. The trap I fell into is that I approached building my morning routine with Internet’s advice to “Think about your ideal day because that is what you are creating.” While I do enjoy my day job, going to an office every day for half of my waking hours in not my ideal day. I needed to consider my priorities in today’s schedule, not my post lottery winning schedule. 

4 – Rigidity

This is a bit of a corollary to number three. Even when I did have a somewhat pared down idea of what was important, if my day did not align perfectly I did not do ANY of my morning routine. We talked about this some in when we talked about babies and bath water

But even when I had time to complete parts of my morning routine, I got irritated when they could not go in the order they were “supposed to.”

Whew – this seems like morning routines are not sustainable at all! No, just the way I was trying to do it was not. In a future post we are going to talk about a sustainably productive morning routine, but I want you to think about what IS NOT working first. It seems painful and frustrating, but that is when we make changes. When pain becomes great enough, we change our behaviors.

Can you relate? What seems to be going wrong in your morning routine? Where are your morning routine pain points? Be sure to subscribe to keep getting posts sent to your email so you don’t miss out on learning to build a sustainably productive morning routine.

By |2019-12-12T10:32:14-05:00December 12th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments
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