Breakfast.  It’s the most important meal of the day.  That’s what they tell us anyway.  I’m not entirely sure who “they” are, really, but I know that from a very early age it seems as though every adult in your life was telling you how important it was that you get in your bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs before heading off to school in the morning.  Heck, they even put it into our cartoons.  If you’re a flannel wearing member of Generation X like me you may recall Timer, a shape changing yellow guy who sang to us about breakfast being so important that we might want to consider things like leftover chicken legs if we were out of eggs.

So yeah.  Breakfast is important.  We all know this.  Thing is, somewhere along the line a lot of us forget it.  The desire to get an extra twenty minutes of sleep in the morning often results in either no breakfast or hitting up your favorite doughnut chain for something that, while delicious, is loaded with calories and very little nutrition.  If you’re trying to improve your health, though, kick starting your day with a nutritious breakfast is an important step on the path of doing so.   Research has shown that people who eat breakfast are “significantly less likely to be obese and diabetic than those who don’t.”

So now that you’ve decided that you want to get breakfast back in your life (you see what I did there?), the question is…where do you start?  How do you get some variety beyond a bowl of unflavored oatmeal without going overboard on the calories and fat?  Well, the folks over at Reader’s Digest have a great article with quite a few tips to get you going in that direction if you’re at a total loss.  Twenty-Seven of them, in fact, and quite a few of them were tips I’d never heard of before (sweetened brown rice for breakfast?  Who knew?).  My favorite, however, had to be “The Blob.”  Peanut butter, dry milk, flake cereal, and honey mixed together to form what have to be some really ugly looking “on the go” breakfast goodies.  I don’t know if it’s the best tasting alternative, but it’s certainly got a cool name.