Eat Your Salad For Breakfast – Your New Weight Loss Strategy

Ok, so I don’t often get excited about weight loss strategies or weight loss books – but I have a new theory on how to get my clients in shape fast and I am pretty excited about it.

It has to do with breakfast (the most important meal of the day) and salad (one of the easiest ways to get your veggies into you).

If weight loss is important to you, this may be the easiest and fastest way to make a positive change in the relationship between you and your bathroom scale.

Ok little buddy. Lets just hug it out and try again in a few days, ok?

The new most important meal of the day:  the breakfast salad!

Now, before you scoff heartily at my preposterous suggestion, ponder this. What do you normally eat for breakfast?  Chances are it’s a high carb, quick burning meal that you scoff down without really chewing or enjoying.  Or nothing.

When do you normally eat lunch?

Is there a lot of activity you need to do (mental and/or physical) that might require a sharp mind and/or energized body?

If you were to run a marathon, would you eat nothing for 14 hours beforehand?

Tell me that doesn't look better than a bowl of soggy cheerios!

If you eat dinner then skip breakfast, that is exactly what you are doing when you show up to work with an empty stomach, work for 3-4 hours then desperately claw at the starbucks counter for something less than healthy to quickly refill your energy stores (9pm dinner, 11am lunch = 14 hours time difference – you never thought of it like that, did you?)

The whole ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ battle is not what I want this article to be about, so if you don’t believe me then try finding research that supports NOT eating breakfast.   I would be interested to hear what you find…

Back to my brekky salad suggestion. I am going to make it easy for you.  Just watch this video and you will see exactly how I make it.  This is in two parts because it is all done in one shot.

Some things just don't go well in a salad. Cats would be included in the list of exclusions.

I haven’t used any tv magic or any ‘here’s one we made earlier’ tricks like that.  Just throwing it together and getting it done.

Right about now would probably be a good time to note that I am no Giada (I certainly don’t have her cooking skills, nor do I have her cleavage) but hopefully what you see you will find useful and will inspire you to believe that you can do it too.

Making time for being healthy is a matter of priorities.  Here’s a tip for those that are tight on time:

Get to bed 15 minutes earlier so you can get up 15 minutes earlier so you have 15 minutes in the morning to make this salad.

Alternatively, you can always prepare things on sunday and cook them up monday tuesday if you are really strapped for time early in the morning.   There really is no excuse for not at least trying this.  Let me say that again:

There really is no excuse for not at least trying this.  What’s the worst that could happen?

Or maybe I should ask you this: If you were  to start eating a high fiber, healthy filling and nutritious breakfast salad, what’s the best thing that might happen?

Toss it around and chomp it up. Salads can do your body good on multiple levels.

And now, for your cooking pleasure/amusement (drumroll please)

Jamie’s Breakfast Salad!

Big ol’ handful of spinach

2 rashers of turkey bacon, sliced into 1 x 2 inch strips

2 spoonfuls of onion, diced & washed

1/4 avocado, chopped

1 ‘drizzling’ of olive oil (reminds me of a joke – why does snoop dogg carry an umbrella?  Fo’ drizzle.  If you don’t get that one, tell your kids.  I will let them explain it to you).

salt/pepper/braggs amino acids to taste

Heat pan to medium.  Cook turkey bacon, then eggs, then onions.

Stir in frypan until done.

Think happy thoughts about your own health.

Chop egg into small pieces and place over salad with onion and bacon.

Flavor, drizzle, enjoy.

Not too hard, right?  Just toss together (literally!) some healthy ingredients and you have a salad ready to go!

And of course, what is one of the tenements, the most sacred of commandments when trying to lose weight and get into your skinny jeans?

Eat your veggies!  Eat more fiber!  Eat breakfast!  Eat healthy foods!  Well, dear reader – welcome to the jackpot 🙂

Want to try it for yourself or make your own Brekky Salad?

Here’s what you need:

BASE:

Base of spinach/lettuce/some kind of leafy green

PROTEIN:

A smattering of protein, could be beef, chicken, egg, salmon, manatee, anything works really.

If you are vegetarian you could use sesame seeds/walnuts/almonds/pine nuts/soy bacon/garbanzo beans – want me to keep going?

OTHER VEGGIE GOODNESS:

Some other (possibly sauteed) veggies  such as peppers/onions/grape tomatoes/cucumber/asparagus… the list is really only limited by your imagination.

EXTRA FLAVOR:

You can use Braggs amino acids as I have recommended in the video, but alternatively you could just use herbs/spices/fat free dressing/fat filled dressing.

Really can’t go wrong here folks, just don’t go crazy with it and let the flavors of the salad shine through rather than drench it in dressing.

If you want to be leaner than where you are, you can help yourself out by eating better than what you are.

So what inspired this spark of nutritional creativity?  Well, to be honest the concept of eating veggies at breakfast isn’t anything new.  All I have done is proposed a larger ratio of vegetables to protein (ever had an omelet with veggies folded into it?  This is just like that but with more veggies and without the muffin and jam on the side).

We all know we need our veggies, this is just a way to get them in at the start of the day – you get a great filling meal, the confidence of knowing you are already well on your way to having lots of veggies and fiber for the day (just like all those healthy eating commercials say you are supposed to) and hopefully it didn’t take too long to make and enjoy!

6700kg of salad makes up the worlds largest salad. Dammit, I ordered the dressing on the side! Send it back!

EVERYTHING IN MODERATION

Before you start getting defensive and waving your Captain Crunch box above your head and saying something about “prying it from my cold, dead hands” just think of this.

Don’t Overcomplicate This

You don’t have to eat a salad for brekky every day.  But wouldn’t it be great it you did it just a couple of times a week? I think that is something any of us can manage to do.

If not because it is quick and easy, then because your body will thank you for it, your energy level will be higher and your hair will be shinier and the opposite sex will find you immediately more attractive.

Ok, some of those promises may or may not necessarily be true… but if you believed they could be, would that make you make and eat your very own brekky salad?  That’s what I thought 🙂

Yours in health,

Jamie Atlas

The Last Exercise Workout Program & Routine You Will Ever Need.

Are your results in the gym starting to stagnate? Feeling like you aren’t improving despite your best efforts? Losing motivation?

This youtube video explains how to get 52 workouts and 52 how to videos for each workout:

Is your workout feeling like it is not giving you exercise or results you need to keep your routine fresh?

As an exercise physiologist, I have had the opportunity to work with a large variety of athletes and people just beginning to exercise. I have noticed that many people do not change their workouts frequently, and when they do, they tend to change the workout in a way that actually increases their chance of injury! Not changing your workout is inefficient and potentially dangerous for the following reasons:

Your body adapts to the workout and your results fade

By not changing the exercises, your muscles adapt and your body uses less calories with each workout. Simply increasing the weight or changing an exercise is not enough. The science of program design is an exact one that requires certain elements to be changed at different times through your workout cycle.

By doing the same exercises over and over again, you use the same joints in the same way and increase wear and tear

If you use the same machines and cardio equipment, you can increase the risk of injury by overusing your joints in certain ways. You also ignore other muscles that do not get trained by certain exercises. It is important your joints can adapt as the body strengthens – if your joints are not working properly, working out will only increase the risk of injury even greater. To make sure you have a clear, scientifically structured path for peak results, I have designed 52 workouts that are to be done each week and progresses in the correct way to ensure proper progression and maximal results.

An example of one of the exercises used in the 52 workout program

Exercise workout programs are usually done incorrectly due to lack of/absence of correct instruction – go too hard for certain exercises and you may decrease your total calorie output due to over-exhaustion of key muscles preventing you from peak performance.

With each workout you get an easy to follow instructional video (in ipod and online format) explaining how to do the workout – every exercise and every stretch features important technique tips.

an example of one of the workouts offered

Purchase in the month of May and receive a bonus video that explains how to ‘tweak’ each of these programs to get the very best results, whether it is improving muscle tone, burning fat or working on your posture.

How much for 52 workouts and 52 how to videos? $104 – exactly $2 per workout.

If you are interested please email jatlas@orbislifefitness.com or respond to this post.

Yours in health,

Jamie Atlas

The One Question you Need to ask Yourself Before Starting a Weight Loss Program

Too often when we start an exercise or nutrition program we miss a crucial element that if absent, almost guarantees our failure.

I missed this element many times in regards to my own personal fitness and nutrition goals.

At a fitness conference it was all at once that the realization of this question hit me.

It changed me with such clarity that it made me want to go back in time, track down my five-years ago self and give myself one of those wrestling moves you see on tv for being such a dummy and not figuring this out years ago.

a picture of me about to go back in time in order to give myself a well-deserved backhand

Many people start an exercise routine and have goals.

Other people are told by their doctor to start doing something.

Others are fans of weight watchers or jenny craig (both of which have their positives and negatives).

The key to success that often gets missed comes to us not when we are at our meetings and not when we are at the gym.

It is not when we are talking with our friends about our progress or our new outfits or our old outfits that we want to start wearing again (even though capris are sooo out of style now).

The key question (and it’s answer) is something that we may be a moment of silence for.

It is the moments of silence in our lives that lend us opportunity to solidify our foundation

The answer to this question helps us at 6am in the morning in the middle of winter when it is cold and windy outside and bed seems just so nice.

The answer is crucial to our success when our friends innocently invite us to a night of debauchery and hedonism the likes of which we sorely miss and would thoroughly enjoy.. at least until the next day.

If we fail to ask this question then we build our fitness goals on a false foundation.

If we are able to answer this question then we have found the concrete pillar upon which we can refer back to at times of weakness, the touchstone that will drive us forward when life around us tries to drag us down.

The key question is this:

What could stop me from achieving this goal – and what am I going to do to make sure it doesn’t?

The answer will change as your weight loss/fitness changes. If you can focus on your answers at times of weakness, you can focus on not letting anything stop you.

Dont

Let

Anything

Stop

You

Like a loaded gun on your hip, have your solutions ready when the obstacles come…

And success will be yours.

Jamie Atlas

https://jamieatlas.wordpress.com

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