Breakfast is the meal most people are least attached to.
Lunch and dinner carry the social weight. Those are the meals we eat with other people, the ones that turn into occasions.
Breakfast is usually the same thing every day, eaten alone and in a hurry.
That makes it the cheapest habit in the day to change, and the one that pays you back every single morning without any further thought.
A friend asked us once how he could possibly eat well with fifteen minutes in the morning to make and eat his food.
We gave him the practical answers at the time.
Later it occurred to us that fifteen minutes is not really the constraint people think it is. It is only a constraint if the cooking has to happen inside it.
Oats do most of the work
We eat oats more mornings than not, and the reason is arithmetic rather than affection.
Oats carry five to six hundred calories a pound, they take four minutes on the stove, and they hold you until lunch.
Cooked with water or plant milk, with a banana or a few dates for sweetness and a spoon of seeds over the top, that is a complete breakfast made from four things.
None of them needs to come from a health food store. We go to ours once a month at most.
If four minutes is somehow too long, the same ingredients left in a jar overnight will be ready when you wake up.
It is the same breakfast, made while you were asleep!
What happens to the sweetness
The usual objection is that this sounds dull compared to whatever you were eating before.
Often it is at first, and it is worth being honest about why.
A pastry is engineered. Sugar, fat and white flour in a combination that occurs nowhere in nature, arranged to be about as close to impossible to refuse as food can be made.
Oats are not competing on those terms and they never will.
What happens instead is that your sense of sweetness moves.
After a few weeks of fruit and dates, a banana tastes sweet in a way that it did not before, and the pastry begins to taste like sugar rather than like breakfast.
This takes a fortnight or so. It is not willpower, it is adaptation, and it happens whether you believe in it or not.
Savoury mornings work too
Not everybody wants something sweet in the morning and there is no rule anywhere that says you must.
Beans on toast is a perfectly good breakfast.
So is a tofu scramble, or last night’s soup, or yesterday’s potatoes with some greens on them.
Any of those removes a decision from the morning, and there is nothing odd about eating dinner food at eight.
The part that actually matters
Whatever you choose, the important thing is that you choose it once.
The value in a fixed breakfast is not really nutritional.
It is that a decision taken on Sunday costs you almost nothing, while the same decision taken at seven in the morning, half awake, costs you a great deal.
Three or four breakfasts you can make without thinking will carry you further than twenty that you have to plan.
That principle is not about breakfast at all, and it applies to the rest of the day just as well, which is where we go next.
