Hi I’m just into my first week but I can’t always do fresh ingredients when it’s a work day
Does anyone know the best brand of granola or breakfast cereal to buy for the bad? TIA

Hi and welcome. To be honest I would forget about breakfast cereal, generally speaking there aren’t many really any healthy ones. ‘Proper’ porridge, not the instant sort, is about the best one. You could make the overnight oats (which I often have for lunch). About 12gms porridge, some full fat yoghurt (around 100gms), 1/2 a grated apple and frozen mixed berries with as much cinnamon as you like.

Other good choices are eggs, cheeses and meat, full fat yoghurt with berries and/or a few nuts. I never used to believe yoghurt would do the job as a filling breakfast but when you use full fat it does 😀.

The aim is for fat and protein to fill you up without the carbs. Or you could do what many of us do and just skip breakfast, fill up on hot drinks and water until lunchtime.

Good luck with your weight loss and keep posting to let us know how you are doing.

You could try finding some Paleo granola, but I seem to remember from reading the labels they are still too high in sugar. I tried a version of the overnight oats but with buckwheat, chia, cocoa nibs and pine kernels which I really enjoyed, quite a nice breakfast meal.

Granola and breakfast cereal are high in carbs, and almost always high in sugar as well. There’s no dodging that bald fact, I’m afraid. I’ve tried various commercial low carb substitutes. The granola was uniformly inedible and only one breakfast cereal was tolerable (the cocoa version of this one: http://www3.netrition.com/dixie_smaps_cereal.html ).

Do you think you might be able to swing making a big batch of your own granola, on the weekend, say? Then you’d have it handy for a quick snack. There are tons of recipes out there for low carb, sugar free granolas made from nuts, seeds, coconut, etc. Most of them call for artificial sweeteners which isn’t great, but if it helps you get over a stumbling block then it’s better than the alternative.

http://mrscriddleskitchen.com/low-carb-granola/
http://www.foodiefiasco.com/low-carb-granola-two-ways-vegangluten-freegrain-freepaleosugar-free/
http://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/2014/03/paleo-coconut-cacao-nib-granola-low-carb-and-gluten-free.html

Hi CazR53

On busy mornings I can recommend to large spoonfuls of greek yoghurt. I add either fresh berries, passionfruit, almond flakes, coconut flakes or walnut pieces (or combination).

-And once you get used to it a fried egg with chilli flakes and half an avocado doesn’t take any longer than getting cereal in and out of the cupboard 😉

Thanks for the advice i’very just found linzi’S low sugar granola ill keep you posted!

I’m doing very low carb (less than 20 grams a day), while a lot of people on BSD aim for around 50 a day. What are your carbs per day goals? I ask because 100 grams of Linzi’s Low Sugar granola has 45.2 grams of carbohydrates. To me that seems very high for a BSD food.

If you keep the portion size down, it would just about be doable on my 40g a day target, it is about 30% lower in carb than my raw beetroot and ginger muesli which suggests a 40g serving at 25g of carbohydrate, and won’t be being opened until I finish the 800 8 weeks. It sounded nice for my maintenance target of slightly higher, but mainly healthy carbs. I would probably use around 20g of the low sugar granola say, mixed into Greek style yoghurt instead of berries and nuts. I may well look out for it when I run out of muesli.

Good idea, Mixnmatch, about adding a fifth of a serving (20 grams) to yogurt. I was thinking CazR53 would be eating it like a breakfast cereal, ie, in a bowl with some milk, and 100 grams of granola is probably quite a tiny bowl.