7-Day Jim Tolles Breakfast Challenge

If you live a life reinforcing your ego patterns, you are not free. All your lifestyle patterns are part of your ego structure. That includes your nutrition.

Your daily nutrition is completely enmeshed in ego ideas of who you are. Most people eat to feel a certain way, not to nourish themselves.

On the path to embodying spiritual freedom, you have to make real-world, lifestyle changes.

This breakfast is an opportunity to step outside your ego normal and to experience your body differently.

Be sure to read the testimonials at the end.

Natural Emotional Balance and Your Gut

The gut produces 90 to 95% of the body’s serotonin depending on which study you look at.

What does serotonin do?

A lot!

Here’s just one thing mentioned at the Cleveland Clinic’s website:

Mood: Serotonin in your brain regulates your mood. It’s often called your body’s natural “feel good” chemical. When serotonin is at normal levels, you feel more focused, emotionally stable, happier and calmer. Low levels of serotonin are associated with depression. Many medications used to treat anxiety, depression and other mood disorders often target ways to increase the level of serotonin in your brain.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22572-serotonin

If serotonin production and other neurotransmitters are out of balance, how we think, feel, and act will be out of balance.

Since the gut is so critical, does it not make sense to optimize our health?

Because if the gut is unhealthy, then that is going to muddle our inner work with all sorts of emotions and physical imbalances. When the emotions and body are out of balance, your ego mind will react. Your thoughts get muddled too.

You are now in no state to do inner work in a healthy way.

Read on for a practical breakfast to help you find balance and challenge your ego. There’s a testimonial at the end from one of my students as well.

What’s in Your Breakfast?

Does your breakfast look like the picture above? (Not the top picture; that’s a picture of homemade chili. That’s what’s for lunch. Let’s take it one meal at a time for now. haha).

Mine used to.

And I would have said, “But oh, hey, this is healthy.”

Have you looked at all the additives and sugar that gets dumped into those blood glucose bombs up above?

No.

How about the sugar in most commercial yogurt–another supposedly “healthy” choice?

Most commercial yogurt is drowning in sugar.

Yogurt often has more sugar per content than ice cream!

So many foods have marketed themselves successfully as healthy. They aren’t. They aren’t healthy or natural or what our bodies really need to THRIVE.

I spent so many years with brain fog and physical energy crashes and cravings because I ate crap like that, milk and cereal, toast and eggs, pancakes covered in syrup, English muffins covered in cheese, and large breakfasts with way too much protein (eggs, bacon, etc.).

And by American standards, this isn’t bad.

By our bodies’ standards, it is terrible.

But don’t take my word for it.

Take this challenge.

Join the 7-day Breakfast Challenge!

On this path, we learn to stay curious, and after having a lot of positive feedback from my students, I’m now inviting all of you to try this challenge to eat what I eat for breakfast for just 7 days.

Here are the specifics:

• Boiled buckwheat groats or oats (oat groats, steel cut oats, thick oats, and regular oats are good, just not quick oats or the crap in those packets. You may also explore wheat berries, barley, and other hearty whole grains.)

• 1 green vegetable (bok choy, kale, or broccoli)

• 1 orange root vegetable (I’ll cook yam or sweet potato ahead of time or cook carrot with the mix)

• Figure out spice combos. Ginger is a great spice with the bok choy and carrot combo. Broccoli works well with nutmeg and paprika. Salt as you like. The spicing makes this breakfast truly enjoyable!

• Add nuts, coconut flakes, and seeds if you want.

• Add a protein like sauteed tofu or tempeh or chicken if you feel you need more protein.

I boil the veggies with the buckwheat or oats in a pot. I typically add the seeds, nuts, etc. afterwards.

Mix together and enjoy. I typically go with as much local and organic stuff as well, but that’s not necessarily important to this experiment. Or it is. Who knows right now….

Keep It Fresh!

Additionally, the only time I’ve gotten bad feedback is where people are using poor quality ingredients like frozen vegetables. The fresher the vegetables, the better. If you have a garden, that’s awesome. If you do foraging, you can add in local seeds and sprouts, depending on the season.

The more natural the food, the better.

For example, almonds are better than almond butter.

There is no almond butter tree. Almonds are naturally whole, not ground or buttered. Your teeth and chewing are part of healthy digestion. Dive into the “Chew” chapter of James Nestor’s Breath to learn more about why chewing matters.

Complex carbohydrates are better than simple carbohydrates.

Avoid added sugars. Your body already knows how to make sugars out of carbohydrates.

Please consult your medical professionals if you have any health concerns. Discontinue if you have significant health problems. If you have known allergies to something, use something else instead.

As part of doing it, write down in your journal after eating this breakfast:

On the spiritual path, we make changes like this to make sure that when we are working on an emotional or physical issue that it IS an attachment and not a body imbalance signal.

Spread the Word to Friends

I encourage everyone to do the 7-day Jim Tolles Breakfast Challenge with friends and family members.

Here are some things you can do to help support others in their health:

I look forward to hearing how this goes for you!

In health and freedom,

Jim Tolles

Building a Body Strong Enough for Awakening

Breakfast Testimonial

Moving Past Ego Control to Deeper Satisfaction

When I originally saw Jim’s breakfast challenge, I thought, “No way!”

My ego pride said that I eat quite healthfully already and don’t need to enter the emotionally stressful terrain of being guided towards certain foods after childhood experiences of food control.

I was finally able to give the challenge a try when I allowed myself to engage with it as an experiment, one that I chose. I felt an immediate shift in my satiety and general meal satisfaction. Prior to the challenge, I often had rice bowls with vegetables, but picking a very hearty grain like steel cut oats and making sure to have both leafy green and orange veggies satisfied my hunger longer and decreased my interest in foods I’d burn through quickly.

Once I felt this for myself, I was happy to make these breakfasts my new norm. I enjoy creating different vegetable, seed, and nut combos that match my mood or ‘gut’ sense of what I want to eat. I notice a sensory satisfaction at the textures and colors and do not feel deprived at all.

Z.C.
California
USA
(Working together 2024-ongoing)

A Priceless Sense of Steadiness and Clarity

I had never eaten a breakfast like this before. I was raised on a combination of somewhat healthy/neutral breakfasts (eggs, smoothies, fruit, etc.) and blatantly poor breakfasts (French toast, waffles, pancakes, cereal). As I moved into adulthood, I started just going for convenience. A green smoothie most mornings. Eggs sometimes. Nothing crazy, I was just doing what I learned was normal. 

I tried Jim’s breakfast for the first time about two years ago or so. It was amazing to me how I felt so satisfied but not overly full. Closer to truly satiated than I was used to feeling. On top of that, it gave me the energy to do whatever I needed to do throughout the day and last until the late afternoon before wanting/needing food again.

The mental clarity I maintained throughout the day was noticeable as well–when my body runs smoothly, my brain tends to work better.

As somebody who runs my own business, I value this a lot. 

Of course it was an adjustment to get used to eating vegetables and buckwheat (I had no idea what that was) for breakfast. That’s not normal in my culture by any means. But as I stuck with it over time, I started looking forward to my morning carrots and bok choy. Today, this is what I eat for breakfast basically every day of my life. I’m very active and probably burn more calories than most people–the breakfast does a great job of giving me clean energy to support my physical and mental activities. 

Over the years I’ve experimented with a few different variations of the breakfast, and I’m still experimenting with more. I had a period where I used peanut butter and honey, but now I’m realizing that they were actually contributing to a feeling of lethargy. When I cut them out, I felt a lot lighter. Various fruits have gone in and out of the rotation. I enjoyed banana for a long time and still use it every once in a while, but I’m currently experimenting with lowering the quantity of sweetness I put in. I share this to give an idea of my of process of experimentation and adaptation. 

Right now, my usual combination involves buckwheat, carrots, bok choy, blueberries, salt, a little olive oil, chia seeds, and various nuts that I rotate through (almonds, walnuts, among others). 

This basic mix hits just right for me. When I want to change things up, I spice it differently. I like putting red pepper flakes sometimes, paprika, lemon juice, cinnamon, and more. I don’t put everything at once. I’ll add one or two things, and that’s usually enough. 

Sometimes I swap out the bok choy for another veggie like broccoli. I usually save the kale for lunch, but I’m going to try it in the morning too and see how that goes. Lot’s of different cool options to play with. 

After two years of eating the breakfast consistently, my body feels off when I go back to my old breakfasts. I can’t imagine not having the breakfast now. It’s given me a steadiness of body and clarity of mind that I find priceless. 

Felipe C-D.
Florida
USA
(Working together 2021-ongoing)