What's for Breakfast?

I am a creature of habit. It’s the main reason I’ve been able to keep up this walk and this blog, probably the two best habits I’ve ever formed.  I am also capable of slipping into bad habits, but that’s another blog for another day. But that’s an interesting distinction, isn’t it?  You form good habits (proactive) and you slip into bad ones.  That is consistent with my philosophy of human nature: that our natural selves are inherently lazy, even slothful, ready to slip into the easy mud of oversleeping, overeating, and general self-indulgence, and it’s only when we access our higher selves that anything in this world gets accomplished.

About two months ago, I formed another habit.  It grew out of a session with a nutritionist that I visited in an effort to develop more purposefully healthful eating habits.  My nutritionist is a 70-year-old woman with a figure, not to mention an energy level, that women half her age should aspire to. She is also good-natured, positive and nonjudgmental. She comes to Austin just twice a month; she lives and works in Houston but wants to relocate to Austin within two years, and is trying to build a business here. Opening a new business, in a new city, at 72 years of age.  That is my kinda woman. 

The first thing she asked me was what I’d had for breakfast that day.  How embarrassing.  This is NOT my norm, but I’d swung by McDonald’s and picked up a sausage biscuit with egg, and owned up to it.  She agreed it was a terrible breakfast, but asked “How do you feel about Egg McMuffins?” I love Egg McMuffins, are you kidding me?  She pointed out that there is nothing in the world wrong with an occasional Egg McMuffin, because it’s got a lean meat (Canadian bacon), protein (cheese and egg), along with the carb.  She’s okay with carbs.  A nutritionist who steers me away from all breads, glutens, caffeine, white flour and sugar is a nutritionist I cannot work with. 

So I bought the ingredients and have been enjoying a daily homemade Egg McMuffin for, oh, about two months now.  But now it’s not just an acceptable breakfast, it’s a really GOOD breakfast, because I substitute turkey Canadian bacon for the regular Canadian bacon, soft-boil the egg and remove the yolk, and substitute the American cheese with a better, whiter cheese.  Oh, it’s delicious.  How delicious?  I start thinking about it right before I go to bed, and when I get up, I start amassing the ingredients, even if I’m not going to actually eat it for an hour or so.  But I’m not neurotic about food or anything, good heavens, where’d you get that idea?

I didn’t mean to take off yesterday, but the boys and I had dinner at Bartlett’s, it went on a little longer than I’d planned, and it was so much fun I just wanted to keep it going by hanging around the house and listening to Jackson play his guitar for the rest of the evening.  But what a great walk I had this morning.  I had an 8:00am meeting at Starbuck’s and since it was already pretty late (6:15) when I took Banks out just for his short morning walk, I figured I’d go to the gym after work.  But Banks was really into it, I had the music on, and I thought, I’ll walk for 45 minutes and do 45 when I get home.  Then I thought, Nope, don’t do that anymore.  So I returned Banks to the house with about an hour left, and did the rest.  I was done at 7:45, rushed into the house for a five-minute shower, put off the make-up for later, and walked into the Oltorf Starbuck’s at 8:02.  I love living dangerously.