One of the most important keys to successfully losing weight is keeping the amount of calories that are put into the body on a daily basis under control. Once you get a superb handle on this, and maintain the habit for a prolonged period of time, the weight will come off week by week.
However the problem lies with the fact that every day you’ll be faced with numerous decisions that will affect the calorie total by the end of the day. Not only must you deal with what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but also the snacks that pop up throughout the day.
And let’s face it, when we are away from home it becomes much more difficult to stick with a healthy nutritional plan unless you take steps to prepare yourself for the situation.
There are a number of advantages to taking travel lunches with you for work or when you’re going to be away from home for a certain amount of time. One of the most important is so that you’re able to avoid going to fast food spot for lunch. Not needed when you have a fabulous pre-packaged lunch!
Therefore, here are 3 easy ways you can ensure you’ll have healthy lunch travel lunches along with 1-2 portioned snacks you can take with you to work daily.
1) Cook extra at dinner so you’ll have leftovers
This is one of the simplest ways to ensure you will have healthy travel lunches for the following day. When you are cooking dinner, just increase the recipe so you’ll have a couple extra portions to guarantee there will be food leftover afterwards. Just make sure you don’t continue eating excessively since there will still be food in the pots and pans.
Get in the habit of immediately portioning the leftover food into plastic travel containers and put in the refrigerator or label for freezer storage. Not only will you be eating healthier with an appropriate portion size of food, but you will save a ton of money especially if you have been used to eating out when at work.
2) If eating at a restaurant, put half away immediately in a to-go container
Let’s face it, most restaurant portions offer far more than is needed for a single meal. If you are going out to dinner, ask your waiter to bring a to-go container with your meal. Before eating a single bite, portion half away into the container and bag it up. Not only did you just cut out half the calories making it a much more appropriate amount, but you’ve also created an instant lunch for the following day.
3) Always have your refrigerator stocked to create simple lunches
If you didn’t cook the night before and there aren’t any leftovers, and if you also didn’t go out to eat either, you final backup plan to ensure you take travel lunches with you to work is to have items in your frig ready so you can whip together something quick, yet nutritious.
An easy way to do this is to have either pita bread, healthy wraps, or whole wheat bread to use along with items such as ham, turkey, reduced fat cheese, spinach, pickles, and mustard. Combine that with a healthy choice of a fruit or almonds with raisins along with a bottle of water and you will have an instant healthy lunch. You can also keep a few frozen meals always stocked in your freezer for emergencies. These can be used for the times you run out of sandwich/wrap ingredients, or don’t have a few spare minutes in the morning to assemble it all together. Most markets offer a variety of choices made by Weight Watchers or Lean Cuisine and are usually less than 400 calories each.
