This week I'm pausing the series on the path we followed to talk about where I'm at right now… and honestly, it's probably where a lot of you are too. Back to school.

I'll be the first to admit things got off kilter over the summer. Between camps and days home with me trying to work my remote job, "just grab a snack, I don't have time to make anything else" became my go-to line to Sprout more often than I'd like to admit. And of course, she'd wander back an hour later, leave the half-eaten first snack sitting on the table because it "smells strange" now, and want something new. The same lower-carb high-fiber bagel she loved one week suddenly earned a hard pass the next. Picky eating doesn't play fair.

But cool weather is creeping in, which means it's time to get this fully dialed back in. Once school starts, she needs to be fed well enough in the morning to get through to lunch, and then again all the way to 4:00, with zero snack window in between. That's a long stretch to ask a kid to run on empty, especially one who gets hungry fast because of elevated insulin.

Here's something found out after I started paying attention to my own numbers: cortisol spikes when you wake up, and it takes blood glucose with it. I see this in myself.  My blood sugar is already elevated the moment I get out of bed, before I've eaten anything. Because of that, I personally delay carbs until 10 a.m. and skip fruit in the morning entirely.

Your child might not be dealing with the same thing. Every kid is different, and some genuinely need carbs early to function. But it's worth paying attention to how your child does at different carb levels in the morning. If a bigger carb breakfast is causing a crash on top of blood sugar that's already running high, you're setting them up for a rollercoaster all day, and that means more insulin working overtime to catch up.

I'll admit, a pediatrician once suggested intermittent fasting for my daughter, and my gut reaction was absolutely not. But it turns out intermittent fasting can just mean keeping meals inside a 10–12 hour window, not skipping meals altogether. He mentioned that teenagers often naturally start eating less or skipping breakfast on their own and suggested I just let that happen. I wasn't comfortable with that either.  It’s possible my daughter wouldn't eat again until 1:00 during the school day, and that's simply too long a stretch for a growing kid with a demanding school day ahead of her.

So instead of less food in the morning, we're doing less food at night after dinner. Same window, different end.

Every breakfast I build gets measured against the same checklist. None of this is something she knows or needs to know, it’s just my planning math running in the background.

If there's one thing picky eating has taught me, it's this: you need more than one thing on the plate, especially where protein is concerned. My daughter would happily eat cereal or a bagel every single day. Protein-forward foods? Not exactly her favorites.

So every morning, alongside whatever breakfast I've made, there's a mini protein smoothie waiting too. If today's the day she decides she's suddenly over hard-boiled eggs, she's still covered by the smoothie. If she's not in a smoothie mood, she has the eggs. Either way, she's not walking out the door without real fuel.

My go-to smoothie base:

She's not a vegetable-at-breakfast kind of kid, so this is really the only way vegetables and extra fiber sneak into her morning at all; well, that and the occasional quiche with finely diced veggies folded in.