Breakfast at McDonald's

Breakfast at McDonald's 

Saturday, August 20, 2011 

New routine, even newer than SP, is to meet my daughter at the local McDonald's for breakfast at 9 on Saturday mornings. It's a time to catch up on her life, spending an hour to 90 minutes before she has to be to work. Today was the third Saturday in a row doing this. 

This has been a learning experience. Before the first breakfast, I went online and found the McDonald's nutrition information, if you can call it nutrition. It looked like the workable breakfast sandwiches were the sausage burrito or the egg McMuffin, each at 300 calories. 

Week one, I ordered off the dollar menu. Got the sausage burrito, a hash brown, and a small decaf. Noticed that this seemed to stimulate my appetite, but I dealt with that. I can work with this level of calories for breakfast. Then late in the day, I saw that I needed an awful lot of grams of carbs to hit minimum, and wasn't that far below minimum calories. Oops. Made my ranges by going higher in the calorie range than I liked. 

Week two, I ordered the egg McMuffin meal and substituted hot tea for the coffee. This is more protein, less fat, and didn't stimulate my appetite like week one did. Ran into a similar carb problem late in the day, but this time I knew it was coming. Had oatmeal for dinner to make my ranges with the calories kind of in mid range. 

This week, I was up early. The plan was to get my 5 mile walk in before breakfast. Five miles on an empty stomach didn't seem like a bright idea, so I had a slice of whole wheat toast with a pat of butter and honey before the walk. Hmm. That's about the same calories as the hash brown, but more fiber, more carbs, more protein, less fat. Okay. Skipped the hash brown at breakfast, just had the egg McMuffin and tea. It was enough, and appetite wasn't a problem before normal lunch time. Had oatmeal at lunch, and went into the afternoon about the same place in the ranges as I do on a typical work day. 

This is doable. Breakfast at McDonalds can be just an egg McMuffin and tea, and it won't be very hard to work it into the daily nutrition. I just had to get past the legacy thinking about breakfast at McD that included hash browns. The point of the exercise is conversation with my daughter, and I don't need to eat the hash brown to have that.