By Setareh Kiumarsi
Do you feel hungry for breakfast when you wake up in the morning?
When we ask you this, your answers are:
“No… even if I don’t eat anything until noon, it’s fine.”
Or: “Eh… I don’t really feel like it, but out of habit, I don’t mind eating something for breakfast.”
Or maybe: “Yes… I actually wake up with a nice feeling of hunger!”
Did you know that one of the key signs of health and proper metabolism is that we wake up in the morning feeling genuinely hungry and also have a bowel movement?
In fact, if we’re not hungry in the morning, it means our digestive tract hasn’t had enough strength to fully digest what we ate the day before. So, when we wake up, there is still undigested phlegm in the digestive tract. In other words, it’s not empty enough to trigger hunger.
When we feel slightly hungry in the morning, it’s better than not being hungry at all, but it still means the digestive tract hasn’t completely emptied and isn’t ready for a heavy meal.
When we’re truly hungry, it means the food from the previous day has been fully digested, the digestive tract is clean and empty, and ready to receive a new meal for the new day.
So, in each of these states, what should we eat — or avoid eating — for breakfast?
And at what time should we eat breakfast?
I’m not hungry in the morning! What should I do for breakfast? Should I eat or not?
As mentioned a few lines earlier, when you’re not hungry in the morning or just feel a slight urge to eat, it means your digestive system hasn’t fully digested yesterday’s food. It’s still holding onto some undigested phlegm and therefore not truly empty!
Now imagine sitting down to eat breakfast in this state — maybe bread and cheese, or bread with butter and jam, or bread with cream and jam, or bread with peanut butter. Maybe even bread with avocado, or two or three eggs. Perhaps a glass of milk on the side.
Is this good? No!
All the foods mentioned above are moisture-producing, anabolic, and fattening. In other words, they create moisture or phlegm. If that moisture or phlegm is properly digested, it turns into muscle, good fats, and healthy body tissues. But if the digestive tract can’t process it, it turns into undigested phlegm and unhealthy fat.
Now, if your digestive system is still full and not emptied in the morning, do you think it’s wise to eat bread and cheese — a heavy and sticky combination full of phlegm? Certainly not!
By doing so, you’re just dumping a sticky, heavy lump of food into an ocean of undigested phlegm in your gut, making it even heavier and extinguishing your digestive fire.
So as a rule:
When you’re not hungry in the morning, absolutely avoid breakfasts that contain heavy, phlegm-inducing, and anabolic foods such as:
- Dairy (cheese, butter, cream, milk)
- Carbohydrates (a large amount of bread)
- Sugary foods (jam, fruit yogurt)
- Fatty and heavy foods (avocado, nut butters, eggs, bacon, sausage)
So what should we do? Should we skip breakfast or eat something else?
We need to help our digestive system get rid of these toxins as quickly as possible.
Enjoy catabolic and fibrous, phlegm-cleansing foods!
Catabolic foods are like porous sponges; when you eat them, they absorb the water (phlegm), helping digest and eliminate it.
So when you’re not hungry in the morning, instead of eating a phlegm-producing anabolic breakfast, go for a phlegm-cleansing, catabolic breakfast. This cleans out your digestive tract, boosts your digestive fire, and fills you with lightness and vitality!
Breakfast for days when you’re not hungry:
- Vegetable juice
- 3/4 cup carrot juice + 1/4 cup celery or apple juice + a pinch of fennel
- Blended drink
- 1 cup warm water + 1 carrot + 1 small cucumber (with skin) + 1 handful of parsley or basil + 1–2 tsp lemon juice + 1–2 tsp honey + 1–2 pinches of salt.
Blend thoroughly and drink.
- 1 cup warm water + 1 carrot + 1 small cucumber (with skin) + 1 handful of parsley or basil + 1–2 tsp lemon juice + 1–2 tsp honey + 1–2 pinches of salt.
- A bowl of cooked, spiced apples or pears
- Chop apples or pears in a pot, add cardamom and rose petals, or cinnamon and rose petals, or vanilla, or saffron and rose petals.
Add a little water, cover the pot, and let it steam. Once it’s cooked and slightly cooled, you can add 1–2 teaspoons of honey.
- Chop apples or pears in a pot, add cardamom and rose petals, or cinnamon and rose petals, or vanilla, or saffron and rose petals.
- A bowl of digestive salad
(The recipe comes in several versions and can be found in the Iranian-Ayurvedic Cooking section of our website)
- After enjoying any of these, drink 1 cup of warm water or digestive tea every hour starting two hours later until lunch.
By doing this, you’ll cleanse your digestive tract, ignite your digestive fire, and experience the pleasant sensation of true hunger in time for lunch.
In the first part of this breakfast post, we talked about days when you wake up feeling full, and what kind of breakfast you should eat on those days. In this article, we’ll discuss what to do when you wake up hungry.
We’ve learned that when we wake up with a pleasant feeling of hunger, it means the food we ate the day before has been fully digested. In this case, our digestive tract is clean and empty, ready to receive a new meal for a new day. So, what’s the right breakfast for someone who wakes up feeling hungry?
Before answering this, it’s important to know until when breakfast is acceptable. In simpler terms: What’s the correct time to eat breakfast? 6 a.m.? 8 a.m.? Or if I wake up at 10–11 a.m., can I still have breakfast?
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When Should You Eat Breakfast?
According to Ayurveda (Traditional Indian Medicine), there’s a direct relationship between the strength of our digestive fire and the position of the sun in the sky. The higher and brighter the sun (around 12–1 p.m.), the stronger the fire element and the Pitta dosha in our digestive tract.
In contrast, the lower the sun is in the sky (like in the morning or late afternoon), the weaker the digestive fire becomes.
That’s why Ayurveda strongly recommends that the main and heaviest meal of the day should be eaten at lunchtime, and the size and timing of other meals should be arranged so that we feel hungry again by around 12 noon and are ready to enjoy the main meal of the day.
So based on all this, our metabolism is slower in the morning, and there’s a higher potential for producing undigested phlegm in the body. That’s why many people (especially those with Kapha or phlegmatic constitutions) wake up feeling heavy. These individuals often have phlegm at the back of the throat, stuffy noses, and allergy-like symptoms; but these symptoms fade by midday, when the fire element increases and metabolism speeds up.
Because of this slow morning metabolism, it’s better to eat your breakfast early and keep it light. The best time to eat breakfast is around 6–8 a.m. Why?
Because when you eat early, your digestive system has time to process it, and by noon, it’s ready for lunch.
So, if you wake up around 10 a.m. (which isn’t a great habit; we highly recommend reading the Night Sleep and Morning Wakefulness post in the General Ayurveda Lessons section):
Don’t eat breakfast. Instead, have a light snack (like a bowl of fruit), and eat your lunch at 12 with a good appetite.
What Should Breakfast Include for Someone Who Wakes Up Hungry?
Let’s say you wake up around 6 a.m., feel hungry, and want to eat breakfast. What do you usually go for?
Bread and cheese; or bread with butter and jam; or bread with cream and jam; or peanut butter; or avocado toast; or two or three eggs… maybe even with a glass of milk on the side.
As we explained in the previous post, all of these are moisture-inducing, anabolic, phlegm-producing, heavy, and hard to digest.
In other words, during a time of day when metabolism is slow and weak, filling our digestive tract with these sticky and phlegmy foods just makes us heavy, sleepy, and full of inertia. It produces a heavy mass of undigested phlegm in our digestive tract— right at the start of the day.
What Should We Do to Avoid This?
First: The Don’ts
• Rule 1: Avoid heavy and sticky dairy products (like cheese, cream, milk, clotted cream, and yogurt) for breakfast.
Dairy (especially cow’s dairy) is considered hard to digest, and eating it when digestive fire is weak leads to heaviness and weight gain.
(Exception: People with a very warm, dry constitution who are underweight may consume dairy with appropriate modifiers during hot, dry seasons like summer and autumn.)
• Rule 2: Avoid eating large amounts of carbohydrates in the morning, especially those made from refined white flour.
Eliminate white bread and toast.
Instead, use whole-grain, gluten-free, or multi-grain breads.
Limit to one (maximum two) palm-sized pieces of bread for breakfast.
• Rule 3: Strictly avoid cold sugary milk and cornflakes.
• Rule 4: Avoid smoothies and milkshakes that are full of processed protein powders and yogurt or milk.
• Rule 5: Avoid combining multiple animal proteins in the same breakfast (e.g., sausage + eggs + cheese).
• Rule 6: Avoid consuming large amounts of fatty foods (even good fats like 2–3 tablespoons of nut butters or a whole avocado) in one meal.
Second: A Key “Do”
Always include a fibrous or catabolic food in your breakfast. Why?
As mentioned in earlier posts, morning metabolism is slow. Fibrous foods act like a sponge, absorbing excess moisture from the digestive tract and helping your breakfast digest more easily.
For Those Who Prefer Sweet Breakfasts:
Let’s say you like sweet breakfasts — like bread with butter and honey, jam, or peanut butter. All these are moisture-inducing and anabolic. Together, they become a sticky, phlegm-heavy breakfast.
How about adding some cooked apple or carrot to the mix? Apples and carrots are full of fiber and help balance phlegmy foods.
• Chop 1 or 2 apples or pears and put them in a pot.
• Add a bit of water and flavor with 1–2 pinches of vanilla and 1 tsp orange blossom water.
(Alternatives: cardamom and rose petals; cinnamon and rose petals; saffron and nutmeg with rosewater.)
• Cover and steam them for less than 10 minutes.
• Once cool, add 1–2 tsp of tahini (or almond/pistachio/peanut butter) and 2–3 tsp of honey. Mix well.
• Top with 5–10 soaked, peeled almonds or pistachios.
• Spread this tasty mix on a slice of whole-grain bread and enjoy with a cup of herbal tea or digestive tea.
If you don’t have time to cook apples, grate a raw carrot and mix it with one of the spice-nut-honey combos. (No need to cook the carrot.)
For Those Who Don’t Like Sweet Breakfasts:
Let’s say you’re not into sweet breakfasts and prefer something savory — like bread and cheese, or eggs.
Maybe you fry 2–3 eggs, add tomatoes or mushrooms, and eat with bread. Maybe you even throw in sausage and cheese when you’re in the mood for something indulgent.
Remember this: cheese should not be part of your breakfast — even with walnuts.
Cheese is one of the stickiest, most phlegm-producing, and hardest-to-digest foods. Eating it will weigh you down and extinguish your digestive fire first thing in the morning.
If you truly love cheese and can’t let it go, limit it to once or twice a week, in small amounts, and only:
• With a big handful of parsley or basil
• On whole-grain bread
• Sprinkled with digestive spices like black seed, cumin, fennel, rosemary, or coriander
If you want a protein breakfast, don’t mix multiple animal proteins together.
Eat no more than one egg per breakfast. Soft-boiled eggs are much easier to digest than hard-boiled ones.
Sprinkle turmeric and salt on the yolk, and eat with fresh herbs, whole-grain bread, and a herbal tea.
If you want to make an omelette, use fibrous vegetables like carrot, spinach, bell pepper, celery, parsley, or green onion.
(Remember: tomato and mushroom are phlegmy and anabolic— they make eggs harder to digest.)
If you have excess phlegm (Kapha imbalance), drink a glass of vegetable juice with your breakfast. (For the juice recipe, see the end of the previous breakfast post.)
For Those Who Are Plant-Based:
Let’s say you’re not into sweet breakfasts and follow a vegetarian diet.
How about a plate of cooked, seasoned vegetables with a nut-butter-based sauce and whole-grain bread?
• Sauté a mix of warm and cool vegetables in olive oil with digestive spices.
• Try using 3 parts warm veggies (carrot, spinach, beet, bell pepper, parsley, basil, green onions…) to 1 part cool veggies (zucchini, celery, cilantro, mung bean sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli…).
Make a delicious sauce with nut butter (tahini, peanut butter, almond or pistachio butter), lemon juice, chopped parsley or basil, and olive oil.
Pour it over your veggies, add 5–10 soaked nuts (almond, pistachio, cashew…), or 1 tbsp of sunflower or pumpkin seeds, and enjoy with whole-grain bread.
I hope you start your mornings with a proper breakfast — full of health and vitality.
Please be sure to credit the author, Setareh Kiumarsi, when sharing or republishing this article, which was written with love and the hope of well-being for all.
