The Most Important Meal of the Day

Recently Kellogg’s Special K has been heavily marketing itself as a diet food. You can take the Special K Challenge as featured in Shape magazine, which consists of a daily breakfast of Special K, skim milk and some fruit, followed by a cereal bar for lunch, fruits, vegetables and snack bites for, well, snacks and then whatever you’d normally eat for dinner before you switched to a diet based on cereal. Special K has only 110 calories per bowl! This means I can eat an entire box of cereal a day and still lose weight, right? Well, I have a few problems with this, so I’ll categorically rant about it and then offer a more reasonable alternative.

1) It has 110 calories per bowl.

A bowl of Special K is advertised to have 110 calories per bowl, but what they really mean is 110 calories per serving. A serving of Special K is approximately 1 cup of cereal which, to me, is not a lot of cereal. A serving of Special K can fit in a tea cup. It does not fill my cereal bowl. That doesn’t bother me though. What does bother me is that 110 empty calories is a pretty lame breakfast. If you add 3/4 cup of skim milk as the Special K Challenge suggests, that’s approximately 65 more calories. Even an entire “high”-caloric fruit — say, a banana — only adds an additional 100 calories. 275 calories purely from carbohydrates can be a satisfying after-workout snack, but it’s not the greatest way to start the day.

2) Special K is a healthy breakfast.

Special K is little more than puffed white rice. There is also wheat gluten, sugar, defatted wheat germ (who knew wheat germ was fatty?), salt, high fructose corn syrup, dried whey, malt flavoring and calcium caseinate. Basically, things to preserve the puffed rice’s texture and to make it taste like more than puffed rice. None of the flavor additives are healthy choices, especially the HFCS, which has been directly linked to insulin resistance. Special K also fails to adequately supply virtually any fiber (1 gram) or protein (6 grams) making it especially high glycemic (a high impact on your blood sugar) and unfilling.

3) Special K will help you lose weight.

If you have ever dieted before, you’ve probably noticed that during the first 2 weeks you lose a substantial amount of weight, which is quite encouraging. Then the weight loss diminishes or peters out entirely, which is discouraging. This is because the majority of the weight you lose during this time is nothing but water. It is virtually impossible for most people to lose 6 pounds of fat in a 2 week period sans liposuction. This is the kind of dieting advice that is given in tabloids alongside celebrity scandals and should not be advocated by food producers. That’s not to say that Special K can not be part of a healthy diet that will assist in losing weight, but a diet consisting mostly of Special K, which we’ve just established is not particularly nutritious nor filling, is basically doomed from the start.In conclusion, this “diet” is nothing more than marketing encouraging you to eat Special K products, which only make you hungry for more Special K products because they’re completely unfulfilling. It is basically as nutritionally sound as an Eggos and apples diet or a Frosted Flakes and strawberries diet. Any weight loss in the first 2 weeks will almost magically resurface as soon as you’re sick of starving yourself, which is why you should try a more reasonable breakfast, such as…

Oatmeal

Oatmeal should be the king of breakfast cereals, but it’s not because it doesn’t have a very good marketing department. People are turned off of oatmeal imposters like “minute oats” or worse, “cream of wheat”, and think that it’s a bland, boring, time-consuming breakfast. In truth, oatmeal can really be spiced up to suit practically any palette — certainly any palette that would consider Special K tasty — and is really quite a versatile food which can be eaten as is, cooked as a porridge, made into granola or used in baked goods. It even makes an acceptable thickening agent for things like chili!

A bowl of cooked oatmeal contains only 35 more calories than a bowl of Special K, which is less calories than a pack of chewing gum. For only 35 more calories you get a good dose of complex carbohydrates, several more grams of fiber — both soluble and insoluble — and a decent dose of some B vitamins, iron and minerals. What this means is that oatmeal will be digested slower than Special K, leaving you feeling full longer and more satisfied and balancing your blood sugar, oatmeal is more nutritious than Special K, making you healthier and oatmeal has more fiber than Special K, reducing your cholesterol and helping to eliminate waste, like all the Special K stored in your colon.  Oatmeal also has none of the additives or sweeteners that are in Special K.

Oatmeal’s ingredients are just oats and whatever you feel like adding to them. Oatmeal comes equipped with a nutty flavor and texture, especially that of the steel-cut variety, but it is nice to spruce it up because it can be somewhat bland. This includes a broad spectrum of desirable toppings, covering fruit (both dried and fresh), nuts, seeds, coconut, spices, yogurt and various sweeteners and flavors like honey, brown sugar, vanilla and so on and so forth. A bowl of oatmeal is as easy to make as boiling water. It’s a little more time consuming, but the extra wait is worth it.