A healthy breakfast is key for lean fitness because it sets the tone for your day. You want a breakfast composed of lean breakfast foods that can help you on your lean body transformation. It could help you manage your energy levels throughout the day, control your cravings, and eat better overall. Eating the right breakfast foods is crucial for your lean body transformation.
WHAT ARE THE WORST BREAKFAST FOODS FOR LEAN FITNESS?
The worst breakfast foods for lean fitness are those that are heavy and will weigh you down. I’m talking about eggs, bacon, potatoes/hashbrowns. And even yogurt. You want to start your day light and energized! If you are working out first thing in the morning, you definitely don’t want to eat any of these heavy foods because you don’t want your body preoccupied with digestion. You want it to be able to power through a great workout. You can nourish your body with the food that it needs after you’ve worked out. And even then, it’s unlikely you will want to be eating bacon after a hard workout! If you’re not working out in the morning then you definitely don’t need all of that food and calories first thing in the morning. Eat light and have a hearty lunch later.
WHAT BREAKFAST FOODS FACILITATE A LEAN BODY TRANSFORMATION?
The breakfast foods that facilitate a lean body transformation are those that will give you energy but that are light. For example, try a serving of avocado breakfast toast or a Lean and green kale smoothie. These are a couple of our favorite breakfast recipes but take a glance through all of our free recipes to see if any others appeal. A few bites of oatmeal with a small handful of nuts and dates is another great option and should give you plenty of energy to start your day. Basically, keep your breakfast light and get in a great lean body workout in the morning.
HOW DOES BREAKFAST FOOD IMPACT LEAN FITNESS?
Breakfast food can impact lean fitness because if you don’t eat correctly before your workout, you will suffer. If you feel sluggish, you won’t have a great workout, simply said. If you don’t have a great workout, you will continue to feel tired and foggy the rest of the day. It’s a chain reaction.
You want to start your morning off strong — set up your mood, energy levels and mental clarity for the rest of the day with a light breakfast and a great workout. When you work out, you want your body to be burning already stored fat anyways — not the calories from the food you just consumed. If you don’t feel great in the morning it’s unlikely you will feel better as the day goes on with its stresses and problems. So make the most of your mornings and start each one off right!
What are breakfast food that are bad for lean fitness but seem healthy?
The foods that seem healthy but are actually bad for lean fitness are pre-packaged options like granola and cereal. People think cereal is healthy, but most cereal products are loaded with added sugar and are heavily processed. Plus, there’s always some preservatives in there — otherwise how would they stay on the shelf for so long without ever going bad? Not to mention, they never fill you up. Choose a bowl of home cooked oatmeal. It takes about 10 minutes to make (or less), and you can even make it the night before and eat it cold with some fruit and cinnamon, or re-heat it if you prefer!
People also think granola bars and protein bars are healthy. But think about what they really are with a critical eye: they’re nothing more than candy bars, remarketed to make you think they are healthy. These bars might have a seemingly healthy ingredient, like walnuts or dark chocolate, but at the end of the day these bars are heavily processed and filled with synthetic ingredients. It’s much better for your health and fitness to eat a portion of freshly prepared, single ingredient foods. “Single ingredient” is an important phrase there—meaning that you are eating “oats,” or “almonds,” or “raisins.” The next time you have a protein or granola bar in your hands, read through the long list of added ingredients that these bars contain—and then think again if you want to eat them. Instead you could have a big bowl of oatmeal with fruit and nuts. Way healthier, and just as quick to prepare if you plan ahead!
Combine a Healthy Breakfast with a Great Lean Body Workout
When you begin to eat healthy, light foods for breakfast and get in a great lean body workout, you will begin to notice huge changes in your fitness, health, and how you feel on a daily basis. The lean fitness is a crucial component of this puzzle, so if you haven’t started using a lean fitness app, you should begin right away. Mission Lean offers hundreds of powerful and effective lean body workouts to choose from. But if you already have a lean fitness routine that you follow and that’s worked for you, stick with it and combine that routine with these changes to your healthy breakfast.
Try to follow through with a lean fitness routine that will raise your heart rate to a significant level. Mission Lean gives you HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workout routines that aim to give you great tone and strength, but that are also aerobically taxing. The goal of Mission Lean—and ideally any lean fitness plan you follow– is to get your heart rate up to at least an 80% maximal level, because this is how you can benefit from the maximum physiological impact from your workout. The more you can stay in a heart rate zone at 80% or higher, the more you can deplete your oxygen levels and enact the EPOC (excess post exercise oxygen consumption) response. This means you will be intaking extra oxygen after your workout to replenish the deficit from your workout. The body needs 5 calories to consume every 1 liter of oxygen, and so you will in turn be “burning calories at rest” after your workout has ended. When you train in this way, you are burning calories both during the workout and after, and so you get a double benefit from your efforts.
Enacting the EPOC response in your body is the gold standard of lean body fitness. When you combine this type of focused workout with a healthy and light
breakfast—one that includes whole foods and is free of processed ingredients—your lean body transformation will be right around the corner.
It’s all about making a plan with your fitness and diet, and sticking with it. When you commit to your direction and the way you want to eat and train, you will begin to see huge changes relatively quickly. Start to make a conscious choice to be engaged with the process of getting fit, healthy and lean. When you immerse yourself in the process, the results follow soon after. Let’s do this! Mission: Lean!
Jon Pearlman is a former standout tennis player at Harvard, ATP-ranked touring pro, and author of The Lean Body Manual. He founded Mission Lean to share his unique formula for lean body fitness and nutrition, an approach that took over a decade to develop and perfect. He is an ACE Certified Personal Trainer and Fitness Nutrition Specialist.
