Healthy diet - breakfast

What exactly is a healthy diet? Much depends on your lifestyle: do you exercise a lot? Do you play sports intensively? Do you have a sedentary job or do you do heavy physical work? Do you spend the day indoors or outdoors? But also on your health: are you in good health? Do you have to follow a special diet for your health, allergies, etc.? Let's assume for a moment that you are and want to stay healthy.

Five meals a day

Your body needs energy and gets it from food. That is why it is important that you eat enough, so that your body always has enough energy to function properly. If your body does not have enough fuel (=food), you get hungry. The greater the hunger, the more unpleasant it feels. What's more, if you start a meal when you are very hungry, you will eat far too voraciously, which is not good at all. That is why it is best to eat five times a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks in between.

Composition of the meals

Make sure you have a rich and balanced diet. Your body needs proteins, energy-generating and regulating foods. Proteins create tissues, such as muscle tissue, so your diet must contain proteins. Energy-generating foods are carbohydrates and fats. Yes, you do need fats, but you must be careful which fats you eat. Don't overdo it with saturated fats, because your body cannot do much with them. And the regulating foods, also called protective substances, ensure that your body functions properly. Without regulating foods, proteins and energy-generating foods, for example, cannot be properly converted into tissue and energy. So the regulating foods actually keep everything in balance.

Breakfast

Start the day well! Choose a substantial breakfast to provide your body with the necessary substances to get through the day. Here are some examples for a simple, but good and balanced breakfast.

EXAMPLE 1

• One piece of fruit
• One bowl of muesli/granola with milk
• Yoghurt
• Drink coffee/tea/water/milk/fruit juice

EXAMPLE 2

• One piece of fruit
• Brown bread (toasted or untoasted) with jam/cheese spread/chocolate spread/Speculoos spread/...
• Yoghurt
• Drink coffee/tea/water/milk/fruit juice

EXAMPLE 3

• One piece of fruit
• Brown bread with cheese
• Yoghurt
• Drink coffee/tea/water/milk/fruit juice

EXAMPLE 4

• One piece of fruit
• Brown bread with chicken or turkey
• Yoghurt
• Drink coffee/tea/water/milk/fruit juice

You can also be creative with this: add your yoghurt to the muesli/granola instead of milk, cut up the fruit and mix it into the muesli/granola and/or the yoghurt, make a fruit salad to combine different types of fruit, etc.

Breakfast is the first meal of the day. Here you must provide enough energy-generating foods to get you through the day. As the day progresses, you will need to consume less and less energy-generating foods, because the surplus you consume, your body can no longer "burn" when it rests in the evening. This surplus is then stored as fat, which is exactly what we want to avoid.

Let's do this step by step. Get into the habit of eating a healthy, balanced breakfast. Next time we will focus on lunch!

- Translated from Dutch by Tamara Swalef -