I love breakfast food, especially at Stanford. Every year I make it a commitment to eat more breakfast. It doesn’t work. I’ve detailed some of the reasons for it in the fishbone diagram below.
logistics
I’m determined to make this change and hopefully cause a chain reaction of waking up earlier, going to sleep earlier, etc. I measured my behavior over two days (Sunday and Tuesday), and first wrote an entry at the time I ate breakfast (before 12PM). I also noted how I felt physically/emotionally at 4PM and 11PM since in the past, eating breakfast and feeling laden down with food has led to some really bad afternoon slumps where all I could do was sleep. I was very conscious of my behavior on Monday when I did not get breakfast and thus noted down some reflections from that day too.
experience
On Sunday, I purposely scheduled a brunch date with a friend before 12PM to get breakfast in. While we were ordering food, I didn’t feel like I had to eat a lot because I knew I had more time to eat throughout the day (perks of waking up earlier). I didn’t feel the need to stuff myself either (another byproduct of only eating 2 meals a day is feeling the need to fill up at each one). At 4PM, I still felt full of energy, didn’t feel like I needed to sleep to get through the day, and even got to have some quality time with my partner. At 11PM, I had just finished a long dance practice, then realizing I hadn’t eaten dinner in my rush to get to practice. I decided that I would eat dinner a bit sooner on Tuesday because I really felt my lack of energy during the practice. However, it came on later than I thought, probably because I ate some snacks during the day.
On Monday, I didn’t do the behavior. I found that I was much more likely to make “bad” food choices. I don’t like calling foods “bad” or “good”, but I think it’s reasonable when it comes to choices— I took more food than I could eat at lunch and got delivery for dinner. I didn’t feel as in control of my emotions surrounding food and did not stop eating when I was full like I usually do.
On Tuesday, I had a meeting at 9AM and decided to get breakfast right afterward around 10AM. I have a class at 10:30AM so I was a little rushed, but felt more awake and ready to start my day after I brought breakfast back to my room. It definitely helped that it was a great day outside. In lectures (when I sleep sometimes because of lack of sleep or food), I actually felt more conscious of thoughts passing and going, as compared to just having thoughts flitter around with no control of them. At 4PM, I felt tired (slump coming on) but attributed it to not having drunk any water until then and a social event with people I was not familiar with (draining). At 11PM, I ate dinner (skipped before dance practice from 8-11PM because I ate lunch late around 3PM). I felt like I was able to stop when I wanted to, and ate what I wanted while still being health-conscious.
what i would do next time
If I were to do this again, I would need to standardize my other meal times. The variation in when I would eat my other meals affected my moods and emotions more than I thought. This would mean finding a good time each day to eat breakfast too. I would also want to have more intent about going to sleep early each night to give myself motivation in the morning to get breakfast. In the future, I might try to prepare breakfast the day before to bring to lecture or eat on the go to avoid skipping breakfast just because of low motivation.
Below is a connection circle of my ideal habit ecosystem for eating breakfast.
