(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

My big problem with healthy eating is, lunch and dinner four days a week and lunch on Fridays, my food supply is whatever I can carry to work and heat up in the microwave, and my lunchbox can only hold one meal's worth of refrigerated or frozen food. My other big problem with healthy eating is, I can't eat breakfast until nine or ten in the morning unless I want to see the food again, and five days a week I work starting at nine, which basically means no breakfast unless a coworker's been kind enough to bring in bagels or muffins for everybody.

What magic tricks do you know that I can apply to have a healthier diet?

Comments

[tassosss]

I carry lunch to work too and this is what I do.
1. A salad in a tupperware. I buy bagged lettuce or spinach, a carton of cherry or grape tomatoes, and pre-shredded cheese. In the morning, it takes about five minutes to dump everything together and add dressing.

2. Fruit. I usually try to take two pieces of fruit with me to work for lunch or snacks. Or breakfast. At the grocery store I get a week's worth of two kinds for variety. Baby carrots already cut are also good to bring in.

3. Frozen food. I also get a bunch of Lean Pockets when they're on sale, and even though they're not necessarily what you may want to eat regularly, they do for me when I have no time at all to make lunch. I can grab a box out of the freezer instead and just go.

4. If I cook the night before, I try to make enough so there are leftovers the next day for lunch. This doesn't always work out because I have trouble with dinner.

Breakfast is trickier for some reason. If I can't eat right away at home, I try to at least drink orange juice for blood sugar (I don't know if that's something you want to do.) Sometimes I get granola bars or fruit or individual yogurts to take one in my bag to eat right when I get to work.

I don't have good advice for dinner since that's the meal I skip most frequently. One of my tricks is to actually go to a friend's house or have them come over once a week. I find cooking with someone else a lot easier.

I have a personal goal to do one cooked meal from my cookbook once a week, so even if I eat cereal the other days I'm on my own, I'm at least upping the good stuff by one meal.

ETA: I think I may have read your post wrong. Do you mean you eat both lunch and dinner at work? I didn't think of that...

[alexseanchai]

I do eat both lunch and dinner at work. My other option on class days is lunch at work and dinner at one of the multitude of fast-food places between work and college, which, no. Class days are four days a week, because I am crazy enough to take a full-time course load while working full-time.

[tassosss]

So you have zero cooking time. I worked part time through college and I thought that was bad.

Okay, I'm just going to talk out loud here. Please feel free to disregard or tell me I'm off the mark or anything.

It sounds like you have two problems. 1) No time/spoons to cook, and 2) not a lot of carry space for two meals.

For the lack of time, advanced prep or ready to go stuff will probably help. The 5 minute salad type thing. One thing you could try if your food budget is tight is to get salad fixings, cooked vegetables, and pasta or rice in their cheapest form. Cook them on the weekend and split the ingredients into tupperware beforehand. So you have one thing of pasta, one of frozen corn thawed in the fridge or other raw/precooked veggies, one of lettuce, one of hard boiled eggs, one of canned beans etc. Then in the morning you mix different combos together so you can get some variety without taking a lot of time.

Another thing to try is a crockpot or cook a big batch of something on Sunday to eat during the week. It sounds like you're already doing this in some variation.

But these don't solve the problem of carry space. The obvious first thing to try is get a bigger lunch box. If that's not feasible, if you have another bag is there space to cram fruit and granola bars or even a flat sandwich in there? If that doesn't work can you bring in an extra bag - I often use a plastic shopping bag for food, so it won't spill on my stuff if it leaks. Maybe it's something you could tie to the outside of your regular bag or lunchbox.

Another idea that may be a little weird is to pack small portions of five or six things and plan to kind of eat on a snack schedule. Instead of three meals a day you eat six with slightly smaller portion sizes, but because they are evenly spaced through the day you don't have a sugar crash or gnawing hunger by dinner, so total you're eating a little less which may take up less space. The fruit and granola (or whatever else you can stash in crannies outside your lunchbox) becomes a more integral to your daily eating, you bring in say 3 or 4 pieces instead of 1 or 2, and then the food in your lunchbox can be split in two -- one part for lunch and one part for dinner.

I hope that helps some.

[alexseanchai]

Extra lunchbox space. Duh. *bangs head*

I shall contemplate. Thanks!

[tassosss]

No head banging! Your head is important!

Maybe experiment a little bit and see what works. Good luck!

[yamx]

For breakfast, have you tried protein shakes? They go down easier than solid food, so you might be able to get them down earlier than 9 or 10, and they are pretty nutritious. A 300ml (about the amount of a can of soda) shake can usually hold me for 4-5 hours.

One thing that's important if you decide to try it is to buy a good shake. Read the labels. I've seen some (usually billed as "diet" and on the cheaper end) that are actually 30% sugar and only 50% or so protein. *shakes head* The one I buy is only a little bit pricier, but it's billed as a "sports drink" and has 75% protein and no sugar.