How To Create Healthy Lunches To Take To Work

**Collaborative post**

Feeding yourself at work can be surprisingly difficult. Unless you have long lunch breaks, no food budget restrictions and live in an area packed with cafes and markets, the chances are you’ll need to bring lunch with you to work – especially if you’re trying to stay healthy!

Luckily, if you take a strategic approach, this is relatively easy to achieve.

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Make it quick and easy

If you decide to prep your lunches in the morning, the last thing you’ll want to do is have to wake up super early just to get them ready. You don’t have to spend an hour to make something that’s healthy and delicious though!

For example, a tin of John West tuna, some salad leaves, a sliced avocado and a nice dressing will only take 5 minutes to put together and will be delicious when your lunch hour comes around. If you do want to do a bit more prep, try to do at least some of it the night before, to free up your morning as much as possible.

Plan leftovers into your evening meal

Another great way of making sure that you have a healthy lunch to take with you to work is to simply plan leftovers into the meal you cook the night before. Cooking slightly larger quantities is basically no extra work anyway, and then you’ll have a delicious meal prepped and ready to go.

Unless you’re obsessed with having new flavours for every single meal of the week, this is a great strategy to adopt. As a plus, you shouldn’t even end up compromising on quality – a lot of meals taste way better the next day!

Most meals can make great lunches the following day, such as bolognese, pasta dishes and curries to name just a few. I use a food flask to send the children to school with hot lunches. You pre-warm it with boiling water and do it up for about 5 minutes, while it is pre-warming take the time to warm your food in the microwave, pour out the water and replace it with your lunch. It stays hot for hours.

Some recipe ideas:

Keep it varied

It’s easy to get caught in a boring work-lunch routine, especially if you restrict yourself to what you think are the only ‘healthy’ options. To avoid this, try to keep things as varied as possible, trying at least one new lunch each week.

Follow some health food pages on Instagram, look in cooking magazines, and get some simple recipe books. Stay inspired, and try to make sure you keep on treating your meals as something that should be enjoyed!

Get some good containers

Lastly, if you really want to embrace nice work lunches, you’ll need to get yourself some nice containers. Get a few in different sizes, and ideally, one or two that are waterproof so that you can pack sauces and dressings without them leaving everywhere. Having some nice containers to transport your food and eat from can make the experience a lot nicer, inspiring your work lunch efforts.

Making healthy lunches to take to work shouldn’t become a chore – it’s an opportunity to get creative, save some money, and really take care of yourself. By following these tips, you should be able to make it a highly accessible goal to meet in no time at all.