Easy ways to add breakfast to your routine

Missing breakfast can have serious consequences for your weight, your energy levels and even your blood sugar. Breakfast-skippers tend to weigh more than people who eat breakfast, studies show. You've also created a starve-now-indulge-later eating pattern. Breakfast-skippers tend to overeat later in the day. Here are some easy ways to add breakfast to your day.

• Starting a breakfast routine is easy.
• The moment you start a breakfast routine, you take a major step toward fixing the problems it has caused, including excess weight and unhealthy blood sugar swings.

• Eating breakfast will result in more stable blood sugar. This means fewer food cravings and hunger pangs later in the day.
• Because you are re-fueling your body early on in the day, you'll have more energy in the morning, and you may find that you start to control your weight easier, too.

• Work with your body. Not hungry first thing in the day? Wait an hour or two and then have a piece of toast with peanut butter, a bowl of cereal, or some fruit, a hard-boiled egg, and a glass of milk.

• Breakfast foods are a marketer's creation, nothing more.
• There's no rule that says you have to start the day with with a traditional breakfast food.
• Have a sandwich, a bowl of soup, or last night's leftovers, if that is your pleasure.

• One great breakfast sandwich is peanut butter and banana on whole-wheat.
• Any kind of protein between two pieces of bread would work.
• Bring along a piece of fruit and you're set.
• If you like milk, add a cup of skim milk, poured into a take-along coffee mug with a lid.

• Energy bars and yogurt are the perfect amount of nutrients and calories to start your day. And both are instantly ready for eating.

• For the ultimate on-the-go breakfast, whirl low-fat yogurt, frozen berries, half a banana, a little orange juice, and some honey in a blender. (For more volume, add ice cubes before blending).
• It tastes like ice cream, but is packed with fibre, calcium, protein and antioxidants.

• Get breakfast ready the night before, so that you can eat it at the kitchen table in 10 minutes or less.
• Pour cereal into bowls, set out silverware and cups, set up the coffeepot, and wash, chop, and refrigerate fruit.