21 Healthy Breakfast Foods

The first meal of the day is an important one. No, not the most important—that’s a three-way tie with lunch and dinner. But healthy breakfast foods are a golden opportunity to kick off your day with deliciousness and nutritiousness that you really want to take advantage of.

“In the morning, you want something you enjoy eating that gives you enough energy to feel comfortably satisfied and energized until the next time you eat,” Rachael Hartley, R.D., certified intuitive eating counselor and owner of Rachael Hartley Nutrition, tells SELF.

Ideally, a good healthy breakfast will generally contain three or four food groups— carbs/starches, protein, fat, and fruit/veggies. This provides you with a balanced mix of nutrients to help you power through the morning, Hartley explains. That variety also brings different flavors and textures to the table, which makes breakfast more enjoyable and satisfying.

Fortunately, there are a whole lot of healthy breakfast foods, and an infinite variety of tasty combinations of them. If you’re looking for some healthy breakfast foods to start your day with, here are 22 of them—along with recipes for ideas on how to enjoy each food as part of a tasty and well-rounded meal.

A note about the word healthy here: We know that healthy is a complicated concept. Not only can it mean different things to different people, it’s a word that’s pretty loaded (and sometimes fraught), thanks to the diet industry’s influence on the way we think about food. At SELF, when we talk about food being healthy, we’re primarily talking about foods that are nutritious, filling, and satisfying. But it also depends on your preferences, your culture, what’s accessible to you, and so much more. We selected these recipes with those basic criteria in mind, while also trying to appeal to a wide variety of nutritional needs and taste buds.