Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Breakfast success!

I finally found something that works for me! It's the wonderfully creamy, delicious, protein-rich cottage cheese. Who would've thought that a "diet food" would be great for someone on a diet? Duh.

I've always loved cottage cheese and often eat it at my parents' house as a treat of sorts. I don't know why it took me so long to think to have it as a staple of my diet.

The standard breakfast has been the following:
  • 1/4 cut steel cut oats
  • 1 tbsp ground flax seed
  • 1/2 cup cottage cheese
  • 1.5 tbsp peanut butter
  • 1 cup frozen berries (blueberries, raspberries, blackberries)
Click to enlarge.

I mix the oats and frozen berries the night before, stick them in the fridge to defrost, then add peanut butter and microwave it all for 2 minutes in the morning. Lastly, I add the cottage cheese and ground flax seed. This satisfies nearly all of the requirements I set out in my original mission: high fiber, low calorie, warm, and dairy.

I've had this breakfast every day for the past two weeks and it's more than held me over until lunch. I'm full for the entire morning! It's awesome. I'm convinced the peanut butter has a lot to do with this feeling of satiety. Whenever I used to eat bananas covered in peanut butter as a quick breakfast I always stayed full for hours. So peanut butter, in addition to protein-rich cottage cheese, is the Holy Grail of breakfast for me.

All this being said, I'm slowly tiring of this combination, in that I'm not excited to eat breakfast in the morning. I noticed this change when I switched over to a new brand of frozen berries that aren't as sweet so that may have something to do with that. I'm still super full, but breakfast isn't as delicious as it used to be. So now is a good time to mix things up by adding different fruit and nut combinations.

I'll keep the first three ingredients (cottage cheese, oats, and flax seed) as the core recipe because they contain a lot of protein and fiber with relatively few calories (~200), leaving me lots of leeway to add other goodies.

Tomorrow I'll add sliced pineapple and cashews to the mix. The nutritional values will essentially stay the same so we'll see if I still find it filling. If not, then I'll know that the key to my fullness is peanut butter in the morning.

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