It’s Sunday night and if you ran out of time to meal prep for the week, you’re not out of luck! One of the best things I ever heard was that failing to plan your meals was planning to order a lot of takeout. How true that is. You don’t need to cook from scratch, but if you aren’t cooking, you need a plan. If you ran out of time to grocery shop this weekend, you can still make healthy choices with pre-cooked foods until you are able to get to the store.
What should you choose? Try some of these:
Breakfast Items (Available at most drive thrus and convenience stores):
Oatmeal with fruit and nuts (choose walnuts to help lower cholesterol)
Egg white breakfast sandwich with turkey sausage (get it on an English muffin instead of a bagel to save at least 100 calories). This one’s higher in sodium, but not the worst you could do in a pinch.
Fruit and Greek yogurt
Cheerios and low fat milk with berries or a banana.
Wawa egg white omelet with all of the veggies you can pick! And a banana.
Turkey sandwich on whole grain bread with lettuce, tomato, and mustard (breakfast doesn’t have to be just breakfast food!) Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box!
Snacks (from almost any convenience store):
Individual servings of nuts
Cheese sticks
Hand fruit (like individual bananas, oranges, and apples)
Greek yogurt
Larabars or Kind Bars
While you are eating these, think about what you are going to purchase for lunch or dinner. The earlier you think about it, especially if you’ve already eaten, the more likely you will be to pick a healthy choice. Studies show that taking just one to two minutes to run through your eating plan will make you much more likely to stick with it. Nothing makes it harder to make a healthy choice than waiting until you are hungry to decide what you want to eat!
Meal preparation doesn’t have to mean spending a ton of time cooking from scratch if you are in a hurry, but it does mean planning to pick the healthiest options available. Comment below with your favorite healthy breakfast or snack. Stay tuned tomorrow for healthy lunch and dinner ideas. No chopping required!