TL/DR:
- Eating well (or at all!) during busy workdays is a common struggle, especially when meetings eat up your lunch break.
- You don’t need a complicated meal prep system.
- You need a list of easy options sorted by effort level. So here you go!
The Whole Shebang:
Is it hard to feed yourself during the day?
Do you want to eat healthy, but you’re short on time?
Do you sometimes realize that between all those meetings, you haven’t had time for lunch?
Or you’re jamming a fried chicken sandwich that you DoorDashed into your face spilling crumbs on your laptop for the 3rd time this week?
Well, I’ve struggled with this, too.
And while I’m definitely too frugal to DoorDash lunch, that means that I have (more times than I’d like to admit) forgotten to eat until dinner and then realized I’m starving.
But recently, because I’m also trying to eat more protein as a middle aged woman (IYKYK) so my muscles don’t deteriorate into nothingness, I decided it was time to tackle the “healthy eating when you have less time than you’d like” problem.
So, here are a bunch of options I’ve found to be working, sorted by level of effort:
Virtually no prep (eat it straight from the fridge or cabinet or nuke it):
- String cheese (or other ready to eat “snacking cheeses”)
- Apples and peanut butter
- Beef jerky
- Frozen tamales/pupusas from Costco
- Rotisserie chicken (I had a college roommate whose family called it a “pickin’ chicken” because you leave it in the fridge and people just pick off parts of it with their fingers all week, and no this is not gross. It’s great.)
- Yogurt, granola and fruit
- Cottage cheese
- Hummus + baby carrots
- Leftovers
Medium prep (make a batch on the weekend in 10 minutes or less, eat straight from the fridge):
- Marinated eggs (this recipe is very easy recipe; but be warned, these are so good I usually have to make another batch by Wednesday when I realize my 17yo has already eaten them all)
- Hard boiled eggs
- Roasted whole sweet potatoes (Taiwan or Korea style: bake on the weekend in their skins, nuke in the micro, eat like a banana by peeling off the skins as you go. I like the long skinny ones.)
- Egg salad (eat on lettuce, in a sandwich, or with a fork)
- Tuna salad (eat on lettuce, in a sandwich, or with a fork)
- Leftovers, with a fried egg (rice with a fried egg, veggies with a fried egg, literally whatever you’ve got, just add a fried egg to it, and maybe some chili crisp or your hot sauce of choice)
Heavy prep (soups, lasagna, etc. frozen in meal size packs)
If you like to cook, these are for you.
Make big batches of anything you like and freeze when in meal-sized portions ready to be nuked on a weekday
Options I like:
- Any kind of soup
- Lasagna
- Meatballs
- Jambalaya