Note: This post is the first of a four-part series, and it includes Amazon links to different foods and food-related products that have helped me lose weight. Ordering from these links helps to support this page.

Have you lost weight?

This past year, I have heard some form of the same two questions every day.

1. Have you lost weight?
2. How did you do it?

The answer to the first is yes, yes I have. I have lost more than the equivalent of one-and-a-half times the entire body weight of my wife.

The answer to the second question is harder to package in a brief phrase. I think most folks expect me to say something quick and easy like, “Surgery,” or “Keto,” or “Pills,” or “Witchcraft.”

From my experience, however, there is nothing quick and easy about losing a massive amount of weight, and there is really not a quick and easy way to explain it.

The underlying principles are simple. More calories out than in, and only enough carbs to properly fuel the body. My goal is to have 45-60 grams of carbs at each meal and 15-20 grams of carbs at each snack. (And by “grams of carbs,” I mean the grand total of carbs AND sugars).

To simplify things, here is the first part of the daily menu that has helped me lose 170 pounds, broken down into four familiar segments. Part 1 is breakfast.

An Ode to Breakfast

I love breakfast food. Like the great Ron Swanson before me, the old me consumed thousands of pounds of bacon.

If there were a pancake hall of fame, my statue would be at the center.

Biscuits tremble at the sound of my name.

You get the picture.

My standard breakfast used to consist of two fast food chicken biscuits and a 32-ounce soft drink. On weekends and holidays, it got much worse. Chocolate gravy, sausage, mountains of bacon, four or more biscuits, hash browns, and multiply that by three if I was at a buffet restaurant.

That kind of eating is both cartoonishly gluttonous and obscenely bad for you. It is also dangerous. It lead me to the precipice of an early death, and it’s part of the reason that I’ll have to monitor my blood sugar for the rest of my life.

But the good news is that breakfast doesn’t have to taste bad to be good for you.

My typical breakfast now consists of an omelette and a cup of coffee with Stevia and Land O Lakes Mini Moos.

The Rushing Man’s Omelette

The omelette is an ideal breakfast for diabetics trying to control their blood sugar. It’s basically all protein, and the options for personalization are endless.

It can include any vegetables of your choice, but I am a man of plain tastes, and the only veggies I’ve ever added to my omelette are diced hot peppers.

We Have the Tools, We Have the Talent

Part of the reason that I used to eat fast food biscuits for breakfast each morning was that I didn’t think I had time for anything healthier. I am a night owl, and mornings have always been hard for me.

Fortunately, when I started cleaning up my diet, my precious wife found an ingenious solution.

From the depths of our kitchen cabinets, she found a microwave omelette maker.

Very patiently, she showed me that I could make and eat an omelette in practically no time every morning.

The omelette that I eat every day takes me only about 11 minutes to make from cracked egg to first bite.

The Recipe

Here’s how I do it.

1. I start with three brown eggs. I scramble the yolks in a bowl with a splash of milk and a dash of regular shredded mozzarella cheese.
2. I then pour the egg mixture into each side of my microwaveable omelette maker. I toss it in the microwave for 3 minutes.
3. When the timer goes off, I add two strips of cooked bacon (I prefer Wright’s delicious Applewood variety) and another pinch of shredded cheese, close the omelette maker, and microwave it for an additional 45 seconds.

The key is to cook your bacon ahead of time. I use a microwaveable bacon cooker to cook a dozen strips at a time at the beginning of the week and then toss the finished bacon into the fridge in a Ziplock bag.

If I can keep the kids out of my pork stash, that usually lasts the rest of the week.

The result looks like a scrambled egg taco. But it is savory and delicious and, most importantly for me, it’s filled with protein and has very few carbohydrates.

Breakfast doesn’t have to be boring to be healthy, and it definitely doesn’t have to be hard to make.

Next time, we’ll explore how I went from ordering multiple value meals at a time for lunch to brown-bagging it every day–and loving it!