We’re born with the capability to recognize when we’ve eaten enough. My 8-month-old can do it. When she’s hungry, she eats. When she’s full, she purses her little lips and turns her head in every direction she can to evade my spoon. She practically climbs out of her high chair to avoid taking one bite beyond what her body is telling her it wants. She knows when she is full with no training, no self-help books, and no health coach to tell her.

Yet, as we grow older, we often turn off this God-given capability. We think we’re smarter than our body, and so we over-ride our body’s signals with new signals from our brains. Here’s the issue. These brain signals aren’t always helpful. They’re the ones that say “Oooh. Yes! Dessert! I absolutely must have that dessert” 90 seconds  after we’ve finished a full meal.  These brain signals are the ones that urge us to finish the restaurant meal because we paid for it or to accept the snack offered by our host in order to be gracious. They beg for popcorn at the movies because we smell it and M&Ms in the checkout line because we see them and ice cream at the beach because we’re hot. Our brains are making us fat.

To break this cycle, we need to remove our brains from power and put our bodies back in charge. Our bodies understand satiety. They understand when we are truly hungry and when we’ve had enough. Our bodies don’t worry about what we smell or what we see or what we’ve paid for…and when it comes to our health, neither should we.

Learning to listen to your body feels like coming home to yourself. Somewhere in the recesses of your brain you remember what it was like when your body was in charge. You can remember how you felt good ALL the time because you were never starving but never stuffed either. You can feel that way again.

Put your body back in charge. Let your belly (and only your belly) decide when it’s time to eat and when it’s time to stop. It will take some time in trial and error to fully over-ride the strong signals coming from  your brain. But when you do, you’ll be just like my baby, pursing your lips and pushing away your spoon when your belly tells you it’s full as if it were child’s play.  No training, self help book or health coach required.

I have a love/hate relationship with breakfast. I love many of the foods and flavors that often find their way into this meal. I hate the fact that it takes place during one of the most hectic times in my day. I’d love to savor something delicious with a hot cup of coffee in a sunlit kitchen, but my life doesn’t always line up that way. I’m not alone. Many people, especially women, skip breakfast altogether citing the fact that they are too busy to eat. Others grab a granola bar or a yogurt on their way out the door and eat it in the car or at their desk. The next time you’re out driving during breakfast hour (and really, who ISN’T out driving during breakfast hour between commuting and carpooling and gym runs) check out how many of your fellow motorists are eating or drinking in their car. It’s become a lifestyle.

While there are tremendous benefits to organizing your morning in a way that enables you to sit down in a chair and eat breakfast without any other distractions, the truth is that the practice is out of reach for many people. And the MOST important thing about breakfast is just to EAT it. After 8 or 10 or 12 hours without food, your body is begging you to break the fast you’ve been enduring and give it some nourishment. I usually coach my clients to have an “emergency breakfast” option always on hand to take with them on mornings when breakfast just didn’t happen. Something like a Kashi bar, a cheese stick, and an apple. Portable, relatively nonperishable, not too messy.

But there are days when even that solution falls by the wayside. And on those days, the only way breakfast is going to happen is by relying on restaurant food. While restaurant fare can often be laden with unwanted fat an calories, that doesn’t have to be the case.

Lucky for us, Health magazine recently worked with a number of nutrition experts to study the breakfast options at various chain restaurants. They compiled a list of the healthiest fast-food breakfasts. The options that made the list had to be:

<400 calories

low in saturated fat

good mix of protein, complex carbs and healthy fats

>3 g fiber

<700 mg sodium

Here are Health Magazine’s the Top 10, with a little commentary from me:

1. Cosi’s Spinach Florentine Breakfast Wrap

2. Starbucks: Protein Artisan Snack Plate (CMS: I’m also a fan of their oatmeal or Turkey Bacon & Egg White on English Muffin)

3. Jamba Juice Berry Topper Ideal Meal (CMS: Oh how I wish we had Jamba Juice in Cincinnati!)

4. Au Bon Pain Oatmeal

5. Denny’s Scrambled Egg Whites, Chicken Sausage & Fruit

6. McDonald’s Oatmeal (ex brown sugar) (CMS: I’m not opposed to a classic Egg McMuffin as an option here either)

7. IHOP’s Simple & Fit Veggie Omelet (CMS: Order this with a side of fruit)

8. Subway’s Western Egg White & Cheese Muffin Melt (CMS At 160 calories, this needs more substance. Consider ordering two…or better yet, adding a piece of fruit or two to make a complete meal)

9. Dunkin Donuts Egg White Turkey Sausage Wake Up Wrap (CMS: At only 150 calories, same comments as above)

10. Panera’s Breakfast Power Sandwich (CMS: Order without the ham to keep the sodium level down; it’s the only one on the list with >700 mg sodium)

So, the next time you find yourself out and about without having eaten breakfast, you can confidently fix that situation without totally derailing your healthful eating goals. And perhaps if you’re lucky, a little sunlight will find its way to the spot where you’ve chosen to break your fast. Bon appetit!