I never much cared for eating breakfast. Women are like that. Many of us skip breakfast. For me it was always that eating took too much brainpower in the morning. Coffee, I could do. But chewing? Never mind preparing something to eat.

Now I eat breakfast every day. After all the downtime overnight, your body needs fuel. The best fuel is something that combines protein and carbohydrate. You can get this in many forms: eggs and whole-grain toast; oatmeal and skim milk; a meal-replacement shake; a meal-replacement bar (this is useful when you’re in a hurry).

One of my favorite breakfasts now is some protein powder in a cup of coffee and a slice of sprouted grain bread with a little whole fruit spread.

First off, it’s not ideal to mix your fruit with other foods, but I do like it and I use only a small amount and, well, this is my life so I need to do what I’ll stick with and what makes me happy. When I say a small amount, I mean about a teaspoon. It’s also usually a berry spread — blackberry, raspberry, or strawberry.

Second, the sprouted grain bread I eat is a multi-grain. It’s also a little pricey. But, there are 5 grams of protein in each slice of this bread. No kidding. Whole grains are good for you — processed grains are bad for you. I have only one slice of this bread in a day and I keep it in the refrigerator so it lasts me a while.

What is sprouted grain bread? They let the grains sprout before they grind them up to make the bread. The bread is heavy and hearty. It tastes wonderful, almost a little nutty. Yes, you can see some unusual little “artifacts” in the bread. They don’t pulverize the grains, they grind them. When you look at a basic white bread, you’re looking at something made from pulverized, bleached wheat. Your body sucks up the carbs from that and rapidly turns them into sugar. The sugar spikes your insulin. This is bad. When the grains are ground up, but not pulverized, your body needs to do a little work before it can make the carbs into sugar. Thus, the sugar is released into your blood slowly, which gives you a gradual increase in insulin. This is much safer.

The third thing about this breakfast is the protein powder in my coffee. I put in half a scoop just to pump up the amount of protein in my breakfast. Chocolate is yummy. The problem for me is that this only gets me up to about 15 grams of protein for my breakfast. It’s probably better for me to get 20+ grams of protein. But an eating program is all about what you can live with and what you will continue to do for the rest of your life. I make up my protein requirements in other meals during the day. If I’ve had a heavy lifting day the day before, I might forgo my toast and just have a meal-replacement shake with 18 - 20 grams of protein. (Your body builds muscle for about 24 hours after you lift; you need to feed it protein to provide it with the materials to build that muscle.)

That’s the story.