Healthy Yummy Breakfast Recipe

I am realizing now that I've been concocting this recipe for years, improving the ingredients over time, and I finally have something I absurdly like and that is actually pretty good for me - and I have never shared. Here's the deal - it's so good that I sometimes fancy it up and serve it as a dessert for dinner guests (hint at the end).

It all starts with what I like for breakfast: something crunchy, sweet, plentiful, but not weighing down; something with good balance of nutrients, with lots of proteins, healthy carbohydrates, fiber, and a good amount of water; and of course something that can be made quickly and without fuss. Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup nonfat Greek yogurt
• 1/2 cup mixed berries (thawed if frozen)
• 1/2 cup cereal of your choice
• 2 tbsp fat-free whipped topping
• Stevia powder to taste

Preparation:

1. Stir yogurt, topping, and Stevia until blended
2. Add cereal and berries and fold as desired
3. Done

Takes about 2 minutes total, 3 if you have to thaw the berries. It requires one bowl and one spoon (two bowls if you thaw the berries). It really couldn't be easier.

Greek yogurt has very little sugar, which is really important, since pretty much all the other types come loaded. If you look at the labels, you will notice that some of the yogurts have three or four times the , amount of sugar that they have of protein - not healthy at all. On the other hand, Greek yogurt tends to be quite hard - which is why I add the whipped topping, which adds a trivial amount of calories (and a hint of vanilla).

The berries are full of nutrients - anti-oxidants mainly, that make you feel good about them even if they weren't so darn good by themselves. Additionally, some berries have really great amounts of fiber, which adds to the goodness. The downside: sugars, masked by acidity.

The cereal adds he crunch and the fiber. Because of that, I use cereals that have lots of crunch and fiber, and not a lot of sugar. For the crunch, you can't beat Kashi GoLean! Crunch (in any of the different varieties). I wish it had less sugar. Trader Joe's (which has killer ingredients for this breakfast in general, except for the topping) has a really good reduced sugar cereal with plenty fiber.

The recipe above, depending on the exact ingredients you use, should range somewhere between 300 and 350 calories. For that, you get a big bowl of yum that is full of proteins, fiber, anti-oxidants, and low in fat and sugars. Or you could always choose two toaster waffles with no topping, or 2/3 of a Starbucks scone. Takes more time to get these two than to do the Healthy Yummy Breakfast. Think about it!

Enters Starvation Mode

One of the things calorie counters like to say is that if you don't eat enough, then your body enters "starvation mode." I held that to be a bit of hyperbole, akin to the notion of ketosis in Atkins Diets, but I could finally watch that happen in real time.

For that, I have to thank a combination of habits I've developed:

• I wear my heart rate monitor at every workout
• I perform some workout every day
• I started calorie counting after my accident and the resulting loss of exercise and gain in weight

What happened? Lately, the weather turned really nice in San Diego. I mean, summer in March kind of nice. And when the weather turns for the better, I lose (temporarily) all interest in food. So I would get to the end of the day with sometimes 1,000 calories to spare - almost half my daily intake. I wasn't trying, I wasn't going for it, it just happened.

Now comes the interesting part: for the first few days, I lost weight very, very rapidly. It was about 8 pounds in just a matter of three or four days. Then, miraculously, the weight loss stopped completely. I didn't lose weight, didn't gain much, either. I just floated at the same level for three or four more days. That was quite frustrating at first, considering that I was still undereating a lot.

Then I noticed something strange. I start my workouts with the same routine all the time: I get a medicine ball and do 50 throwing crunches, where I throw the ball up in the air and catch it, while lifting my back from the floor. It's a great abs exercise, is decent warm-up, and tells me at once how I feel that day.

Typically, on a set of 50, I will get up to about 120 beats per minutes (bpm). If the ball is heavier it can get to 130, in the opposite case I get up to 115. But when starvation mode entered the picture, I could only get up to 100 bpm. The pattern continued throughout the workout: no matter what I did, I could barely move my heart rate up. Even when it went up, it almost immediately fell down to a resting pulse.

Now, if you extend this to the whole day, then my body would have decided to actually save energy by shutting down the expendable fueling. If you need the energy, we'll produce it. If you are not using it, we're turning it off. Sorta like a smart furnace at home.

With two differences: first, you don't lose weight any more, because your body doesn't burn more than it gets. And second, the "empty" energy is actually used to fuel your muscles (including your heart) and make them run more smoothly. Working out in starvation mode is like chronically omitting your warm-up. You are cold at every machine, with the risks that go along with that.

Scary thought!

Tracking Calories by Bar Code

It's been a while now that, whenever I need to lose weight, I start calorie counting. Most recently that happened in February, when I gained 15 pounds after a bad snowboarding accident. I was incapacitated for weeks, barely able to get out of the house, and the only place close enough to walk to was the grocery store. A fancy grocery store (I live near La Jolla, after all) with the best junk groceries you could imagine.

I currently use MyFitnessPal for tracking. The site is free, is reasonably well-built, and has an active community of people tracking food stuff. From a features perspective, the About.com calorie tracker is probably more exciting, but it's not free for advanced use, and it doesn't share foods (which really stinks, because that way most foods at grocery stores are not available).

MyFitnessPal has many advantages, but also one humongous disadvantage: it is cumbersome to use. Tracking calories is a pain, because you constantly have to jump between screens. Sometimes that's because of unnecessary flows, sometimes that's because the author doesn't like to use what's called AJAX. In any case,  you end up spending a lot of the time you interact with the site, just waiting for the next page to load, for no good reason.

[As an example, consider the section where you enter the calories you spent exercising. You go to the "Exercise" page. From there, you click on "Add Exercise", where you are presented with a form that contains all exercise types you've already performed. You select the exercise you just performed, the duration, optionally the calories, and then save. Way too many clicks, where all I want to do is say how many calories I spent exercising.]

There is, though, a simple way to improve the whole process, and I am thinking of doing something about it. That's to use the bar codes on food stuff to record what you have just eaten.

Basically, you take the box in which the food cam and wave it in front of your webcam, or camera phone (iPhone, for instance). The camera sees the bar code, matches it up with the database it has and enters the food data into your record. If the bar code is not entered yet, it will ask you to take a picture of the nutritional information for later evaluation.

If you eat more or less than one serving, you just change that in the record. It's easy to do, and the software can be even modified to remember how much you typically eat of a given food. Your calorie counting life then becomes a matter of simply waving your food in front of your camera (iPhone), and the phone can immediately analyze how you are doing and how far you are from nutritional goals.

Even better, the app could also tell you what you SHOULD be eating instead of what you are holding in your hands... ;-)