Carrot Slaw for Breakfast? A Year of Dietary Fluctuations and How Light Can One Go?

The rapid turnover from Christmas/Solstice to New Year always catches me by surprise, especially living in such a 'far back' timezone. Some places, it's already New Year's Eve!

I don't set great store by New Year's, because I have always believed that any moment can be a beginning. I remember as a kid saying incredulously "but every minute, a new year starts." Perhaps it was easier for me to recognize this, with Jewish New Year--and school year, for that matter--both falling in September, and then everyone's birthday is their own new year's beginning.

All that said, it's a useful time to take stock and reflect, to align with the collective energy, to join the chorus. I'll be back tomorrow with some more general reflections about the year as a whole, but today, perhaps prompted by a bizarre comment I left on Gena's blog, saying that I was going to have carrot 'slaw for breakfast the next day, I'll start with that oddity, and go back over a year of odd breakfasts. I really like to have the same thing for breakfast every day, mostly for convenience, but over the course of the year, that "same thing" has shifted often. It may be that I'd be better off varying my breakfasts throughout a given week: it seems I'm prone to feeling nauseous after breakfast, and something can work for a while and then suddenly "not work."

I did, in fact, have carrot 'slaw for breakfast the morning after that comment. It may not be surprising, given my obsession with carrots, that I thought of them when feeling out of sorts with my regular breakfast and generally a little under the weather.

Carrot Breakfast 'Slaw for 1

1 large grated carrot

1 tablespoon melted coconut butter

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

squeeze of lemon juice

Mix all these together and let sit overnight.

Top with a teaspoon of ground flax meal, a teaspoon of lecithin, and a tablespoon or two of goji berries and raisins. Can also add some spirulina for protein.

I also had a kiwi and half an orange to round this breakfast out. It may not sound like a lot, but it sure was delicious.

In the early part of the year, I was having a smoothie with a bazillion different superfoods and vegetables and no fruit or sugar.

Then, that stopped working, or I stopped being willing to have it "not work," and I was eating leftover salads and carrots for breakfast. For a while, I was eating only yams, carrots, nettles and some coconut kefir, so the first three of those were my breakfasts.

Then, I went back to all-fruit, and a big hunk of watermelon...

...or other fruit medley was my breakfast.

Then, I got back into smoothies, but felt like I didn't have time to make them at breakfast, and needed something quicker. Sometimes, I had berries, fruit and coconut kefir with spirulina.

Then, for months, my breakfast was quinoa/amaranth/millet very-watery-porridge with berries, banana, turmeric and occasionally flax meal and protein powder.

At some point in there, I stopped eating bananas again because they're not digesting well for me. And for some of that time, I substituted adzuki beans for the millet and quinoa.

Lately, my breakfast has been chia pudding made from one tablespoon of chia seeds soaked overnight in water or herbal tea, sometimes adding some thawed acai juice, with some protein powder, lecithin and tocotrienols added in the morning and some fruit on the side.
It's amazing to me how filling that breakfast is for so few calories! You'd also think (I also thought) that with so few calories, there'd be no way I'd get nauseous.
Wrong! Just the past couple weeks, after a month or so of chia pudding for breakfast every morning, I've been nauseous until lunchtime after eating it.

Hence the carrot 'slaw, and very occasionally, if something like this is marked down at the store...

 ...I'll have it for breakfast with a little flax meal and lecithin, and a few berries.

Maybe I'll go back to chia pudding tomorrow, or perhaps I'll just have to have carrot 'slaw again!

It seems like I've come in a full circle from minimal sugar and low calories but lots of 'superfood' type stuff, through just fruit with no protein at all, through starchy porridge, porridge with added protein powder, and back to minimal sugar and low calories with 'superfood'-type stuff, albeit in a simpler version. Perhaps it's natural to go more fruity in the summer, even up here. But if anything, I'm eating a higher percentage of raw foods now than I was in the summer, when I was eating quite a bit of cooked starch.

My inner minimalist is definitely in the ascendant right now, both for frugality and for the simple, academic interest of seeing how little food I actually "need." That's an area in which I can claim to some expertise, actually, and in the new year I'm going to start sharing some tips for "going lightly." When I have time, I'll write a whole book about it!

Would you be interested in a book on "going lightly," or are you more interested in the "rev your metabolism and eat all you want" approach (which I don't have the expertise to offer!)?

Is there any breakfast I haven't tried and should try?