Eat Healthy At Work With These Tips

Eat Healthy At Work With These Tips

There are times when it can be challenging to eat healthy at work. Between colleague birthday parties, catered lunch meetings, breaks at the local coffee shop or bakery, vending machine temptations and a time crunch to get out the door in the morning, healthy eating at work can fall by the wayside. During the workday, it’s important to stay fuelled, energetic and focused so you can produce quality work – and there are plenty of ways that you can make this happen with our tips, ideas, and recipes to help you eat healthy at work.

Meal Prep for the Week

We can’t stress this point enough: meal prepping is essential to keeping your health goals on track, instead of gobbling 3 slices of cake at an office birthday party because you didn’t eat lunch. Meal prep takes a few hours at the beginning of the week and pays off, as you’ll have plenty of food to nourish you and you’ll spend less time cooking or prepping food during the week.

There are a few ways that you could meal prep for a healthy week of eating at work. You can:• Make a huge batch of one or two meals (a stew, a one-pot meal, dairy-free soup, something in the slow cooker, a casserole, a quinoa salad, etc.) and have it as your main dish throughout the workweek.

• If you’re not a fan of leftovers, simply wash and prep your produce at the beginning of the week. Then, you can pull meals and snacks together the night before work with ease.

Choose Simple Recipes

Whipping up an elaborate meal at 10:00pm to eat the next day just isn’t practical (and sometimes the more complicated meals don’t always travel or reheat well). Stick to the simple things, like:

• Recipe-free dinner bowls
• Mason jar salads
• Wraps or burritos (try these gluten-free alternatives to bread for wrapping up the goodness)
• Bean + veggie salads or egg/chicken salad
• Homemade sushi
• Egg or tofu quiche baked in muffin tins for easy portioning and packing

Make Healthy Snacks

As part of your meal prep for the week, ensure you have healthy snacks on hand. This will help satisfy hunger during the day, and you can even make a full lunch of snacks if you’d like to. It’s easy to whip up a batch of hummus for the week or bake homemade bread. Some snacks that will help you eat healthy at work are:

• Dips or spreads with veggies or crackers
• Gluten-free bread
• Muffins – you can go either sweet or savoury
• Granola or granola bars
• A mix of nuts and seeds
• Fruit
• Dairy-free yogurt
• Chocolate hemp spread and fruit
• Roasted chickpeas
• Baked apple chips
• Nut or seed butter

We find it is helpful to have a stockpile of shelf-stable snacks you can keep at your desk throughout the week, like nuts, seeds, dried fruit or granola, along with a stash of snack items you can leave in the fridge, so you don’t need to bring them with you every day.

Say No to Food That Doesn’t Match Your Health Goals

In a work environment, it’s likely that you will confront situations with food that don’t meet your health goals and your co-workers may give you a hard time about not participating. However, it’s OK to say no to food that you know won’t make you feel good. A simple ‘no thank you’ will suffice. If the pressure continues, you can let colleagues know that you are working on your health right now, and you hope they enjoy a slice of cake/cookie/cupcake for you instead.