A bit of meal planning and organisation can go a long way to making your daily lunch and snacks healthy and easy, and it keeps you from overspending at the nearest café.
Lunch
Lunch should be something you can look forward to! It’s a way to break up your day, refresh your body and your brain.
1. Map out your week
When I sit down to plan my meals for the week, I like to have a pretty good idea of what I have on. Are there lunches you are going to out for? Do you have any morning teas at work? When are you going to need to bring lunch from home? This saves you over or under catering for yourself.
2. Pick your recipes
Leftovers
When you are dishing up dinner for the family, serve yourself some lunch for the next day. Putting it straight into a lunch container means that nobody is going to go back and eat your lunch for their ‘seconds’ and it can make you conscious of portions at both meals.
Big Batches
Someone once said to me that ‘a Sunday well spent brings a week of content’ and I love the sentiment behind it. Grab a stack of your favourite food containers and portion up enough meals for some, if not all of the week ahead. It saves so much money and reduces the stress of needing to decide what to eat every day.
Some of my favourite meals to cook for the week ahead are:
Nachos with a Twist – I freeze the cooked mince and pack the salad ingredients each night for the next day.
Bacon, Leek and Mushroom Risotto – I will usually pack a container of baby spinach or frozen vegetables to stir through this delicious reheated rice dish.
Chicken and Cashew Stir Fry – served with a cup of instant rice.
Salads
A salad is a healthy, vegetable filled meal for lunch. But don’t fall into the trap of packing lettuce, tomato, cucumber and tuna if you know you are not going to be excited to eat that. Pack a salad with things that will fill you up and be super satisfying.
Try these salads:
Sandwiches
The humble sandwich is still a lunch favourite of mine. Loading your sandwich up with vegetables and having a salad on the side ensures you have a healthy and satisfying lunch. Try our perfect picnic sandwich or cracker toppings for different sandwich ideas.
3. Write a plan
Writing down what you’re going to do for lunch each day of the week will save you a lot of brainpower during the week. Put your lunches into a Weekly Meal Planner, the same way you would for dinners. This makes it easy to create a shopping list and stick to the plan
If you like the idea of doing a big cook-up, make sure you think about how frequently you want to eat that meal. If you have it everyday, chances are you will get sick of it pretty quickly. Try alternating the mass cooked lunch with leftovers from dinner or a fresh salad.
4. Make the mornings easy
It can be tough enough getting up to face a day at work and trying to get everyone out the door. Spending 5 minutes the night before getting your lunch together means you can grab and go in the hectic-ness of weekday mornings.
Snacks
I see many clients who pack wonderfully healthy lunches but then find they get home starving hungry and want to eat all the food in the pantry. And when you’re hungry the first things you reach for are high energy convenience snacks – cheese and crackers, packets of chips, biscuits etc. This ‘reactive’ snacking can throw off a lot of positive food choices. Being proactive and planning your mid-meal snacks puts you in control and is one of the simplest steps to improve your eating habits.
When do you get hungry?
Have a think about your usual eating pattern. What times of the day do you find yourself looking for something to eat? Is that because you’re hungry? Bored? Trying to break up the day? Because it’s there? If you’re not sure, it can be helpful to keep a bit of a food awareness journal for a week or so. Focus on writing down the time and reason for eating at each occasion.
Plan in some snack time
Pick the times that you are going to get the most out of your snack food and plan a snack for that time. I know that for myself, my stomach is grumbling at 10-10:30am, I loose concentration at about 3:30/4pm and then I will be hungry when I get home. So I have some fruit and a cup of tea in the morning, I plan an instant coffee (don’t judge me) and muesli bar for the afternoon and I have some veggie sticks and hummus ready to go when I get home. This prevents be from getting ‘HANGRY’ and devouring everything in sight. My colleagues and housemates are very grateful for my forethought!
Count your fruit
When I moved out and was struggling with grocery shopping, one of the best tips my mum gave me was to count the number of pieces of fruit to buy. 2 pieces of fruit a day means 14 pieces of fruit a week. So when your packing up your lunch for the day count that you have 1-2 pieces of fruit ready to roll.
I also find that pre chopping or making a fruit salad makes me much more enthused to eat fruit for a snack.
Pair your fruit with a source of protein or healthy fat to make it feel more substantial and to keep you feeling fuller for longer:
- Pear slices and 30g of bitey cheese
- Berries and 200g of yoghurt
- Apple slices and 1 Tbsp nut butter
- Grapes and 30g of cashews
Include one vegetable snack per day
Vegetables are nutrient dense without being high in energy, which makes them the perfect snacking tool. Vegetable snacks not only help you to reach your 5 serves a day but, when paired with sources of protein and healthy fat, they can also be deliciously satisfying. Try some of our vegetable snacks keep you going between meals.
Consider your cuppa’
A milky coffee carries a few calories so it can be counted as a snack unto itself. Caffeine also acts as an appetite suppressant, so an afternoon coffee may be a helpful thing to get you through the sugar cravings in the afternoon. Whenever you like your cuppa, plan it into your day’s snacks so that you can look forward to it!
Remember, planning and preparation is all about being kind to your future self. While it might seem like a chore to do the preparation initially, it will make life easier throughout the week.
If you’re tired of restrictive dieting and ready to make small, gradual, long term changes to your eating habits, the team at The Healthy Eating Hub is ready and waiting for you!
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