Goodbye Granola

I recently ended a serious relationship…with my cereal. For as long as I have eaten solid foods (quite some time since I rejected baby food as an infant), I have started my day with a bowl of cereal. The brand of cereal has changed many times over the years, but it has always been my go-to morning grub. Cheerios. Total. Raisin Bran. Golden Grahams. Grape Nuts. Special K with Red Berries. Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds (that relationship lasted for nearly five years). Kashi Crunch. And, for the past two or three years, Cascadian Farms Cinnamon Raisin Granola has been my breakfast du jour.

I’ll take a moment here to give myself some gold stars for being a devout breakfast eater. Even before the research proving the health benefits of the a.m. meal piled up (lower risk of heart disease and weight gain to name a few), my mom knew what was good for me. In fact, I wake up hungry. Every. Single. Day. Bleary eyed, I stumble into the kitchen, pour myself a bowl of some kind of crunchy concoction, splash on organic non-fat milk, and chow.

No more.

Earlier this week I decided to examine just what, exactly, was in my breakfast bowl. It was a nightmare. One serving of my sweet granola with chewy raisins is 2/3 cup. When I measured how much I poured into my bowl it came out to two servings. One serving contains 210 calories. So I was shoveling in 420 calories and that doesn’t even include the milk. But let’s move beyond calories because I am happy to take in 500 of them in the morning if it’ll keep me full for hours so I can work without being interrupted by a growling belly.

The American Heart Association recommends that women consume no more than 6 teaspoons or 22 grams of sugar per day. One serving of granola contained (hey, I’m already using past tense—this breakup looks promising!) 16 grams. This means that I was (again!) consuming 32 grams of sugar, which is 50 percent over my daily sugar allotment before my day even started. No wonder I was ravenous within hours as my blood sugar took a steep nosedive following a short-lived rush.

And let’s not even get into the sodium. Okay, let’s. The AHA also recommends swallowing no more than 1,500 mg of sodium per day. I was already getting a third of that from a single food. Before 8 a.m. Ew.

So this brings me to making the change. Changes are not easy. I once wrote an article about the different steps involved in behavior change (pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, maintenance, and relapse). No need to go into the details here, but suffice it to say that anything that involves more than two steps (beginning, end) is pretty difficult to do. Case in point.

Since I’ve been eating the stuff for so long, I wake up craving cereal. Instead, this week, I decided to start my day with eggs. I don’t love eggs. I certainly don’t love them like I love granola. But I will learn to love them. I will nurture this relationship like any new relationship. I am still working out the right combination of food in the morning that will keep me full, since the ultimate goal here is to feel satisfied for at least three hours--ideally more.

Day One: I scrambled up one whole egg with one egg white. (By the way, research has disproved the theory that eating eggs raises cholesterol; it doesn’t.) To the eggs, I added a handful of baby spinach, some sliced red pepper, shredded carrots, and one vegetarian breakfast patty that I nuked in the microwave. (Funny thing, I don’t even like real sausage, but these things are surprisingly tasty!) Breakfast was delicious, but I was still hungry about two hours later.

Day Two: I decided that my error on day one was not enough fat and not enough food. So, I added a tiny amount of butter (probably ½ Tbsp, if that) to the hot pan. And, I scrambled up two eggs instead of one egg and one white. The other ingredients remained the same. Observations: The butter added great flavor (um, hello, it’s butter!), but I was still hungry two hours later.

When I told my mom about my experiment she suggested that I needed some kind of carbohydrate to help keep me full. A piece of toast or an English muffin. Good thinking, Mom. But it was already too late to go to the grocery store for carbs. And, on Day Three I was headed to Northwestern to speak to journalism students about freelance writing. So I started my day with a bowl of cereal (hey, relapse is a part of behavior change!)

However, when I got home, I decided that the only way to really make this change is to remove temptation so I tossed the cereal into the garbage. (Don’t worry, I took it out after snapping the photo above and recycled the cardboard container.) I realize that there are starving orphans in Africa and probably starving people down the street, but desperate times call for desperate measures. So into the garbage my granola went. This breakup is getting nasty.

Tomorrow will be Day Four. (Or Day One again? Who cares!) Since I don’t have a toaster and posses a mild fear of the broiler (um, there is not supposed to be fire in my oven!) I am resting my faith on this carbohydrate solution that I picked up today: Food for Life Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted Grain Tortillas. Breakfast burrito, here I come! I’ve never had one before, but I’ve got high hopes for these little buggers.