Week 2 of our journey: Breakfast

We are in week 2 of a 4 week program. The food we have tasted at the classes has been great. I get all Phil. One evening we tasted a sample of Overnight Oatmeal and Cashew Waffles. I was so excited I came home and wanted to make it for the oatmeal for us to have in the morning.

Breakfast in our house is a big deal. We are both believers in a good breakfast. That is where our similarities end. Phil could eat the same huge bowl of cereal with milk, two pieces of toast with butter and jam, and coffee every day. This routine is periodically broken with pancakes or fried eggs. He is a simple eater, but his breakfast is loaded with calories.

I, on the other hand, love (and I do mean love) bacon, potatoes, french toast, and sourdough toast. No shortage of bad actors there! I will usually have an egg with my bacon and potatoes, but that is only for show. I don't drink milk, don't like cold food in winter, eat pancakes only because Phil makes them, and have many other specific breakfast idiosyncrasies. Thankfully, I know better than to eat my favorite breakfast daily, so mix it up with hot oatmeal, cream of rice, smoothies in the summer, and even cereal with almond milk, and anything that strikes my fancy.

So how do we exchange our high glycemic breakfast for a low glycemic, hearty, and tasty meal? Changing our breakfast is proving to be a big challenge. Not so much for me, because I have eaten vegan in the past and love vegan breakfasts. But we do like to eat breakfast together, so exchanging eggs for tofu, cows milk for almond milk and losing the syrup and jam will prove to be challenging if I don't want to make two different meals every day.

When making dietary and lifestyle changes we want to sustain, I need to be thoughtful about my family's desires, and their needs. We both have a family history of heart disease and diabetes, so eliminating all animal products would be the best case scenario, but I have decided to do it in phases. Breakfast, being the most important "comfort"meal, I have decided to make changes myself and allow Phil to change in small steps.

Step one: Oatmeal. He will eat oatmeal if I make it. The overnight oatmeal is yummy, but makes a large amount. He is not ready for this recipe, as it has lots of stuff in it.

Step two: Try to get him to change from cows milk to almond or rice milk.

Step three: Introduce Scrambled tofu, Soyriso, paired with roasted potatoes with veges, and start adding fruit to breakfast.

When considering lowering the glycemic index, the goal is reducing bread, cereal. pancakes and other flour products. The Cashew Waffles were a wonderful alternative. I will see if he likes them.