Healthy lunch ideas are the answer for the multitudes of us out who want good health but just with no time to worry about finicky diets. Also it’s so easy to hop into a Mars bar or choc milk at lunch time instead of eating a less calorie laden lunch, like say a salad!
You really can’t beat healthy salads as number one choice here. The added benefits such as keeping ourselves slender by eating healthy foods is another spin off. Good health does mean being as close as the next Mars bar will permit you to be to your appropriate bodyweight. How’s this – one cup of chopped raw carrots contains a miserly 52 calories.
Healthy Salads
Carrots, let’s take a closer look at this humble vegetable which is an absolute must for healthy salads. It has all the wonderful vitamins in it from A to K (yes even the B vitamins in the form of B6).
It is also a good source of Thiamin, Niacin, Folate and Manganese, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber. It’s very low in Saturated Fat and Cholesterol. You almost feel healthier already just reading about it.
A healthy salad for lunch does not necessarily mean toiling away your precious time making some exotic salad to take for your lunch. It’s as simple as tossing into the lunch box a variety of different colored salad ingredients starting with the green foliage as a base. The green foliage of course means folate. Folate looks after our nervous system and brain function.
When wandering around the supermarket shelves and looking at prices you could be justified in thinking that eating healthy foods is expensive. Salad ingredients can be costly! Therefore buying whatever is in season will generally fix this. It is our experience that ‘in season’ produce is almost always significantly cheaper than ‘out of season’.
The carrot is often priced much cheaper than other vegetables so make sure to throw in some sliced carrot. It doesn’t matter if carrots are cooked or raw. Some people are concerned that they will lose the nutritional value in cooking. It is the water soluble vitamins that are affected when cooking carrots. It is about 20% of the nutritional value lost by cooking. That still leaves a bunch of benefits to eating this vegetable whether raw or cooked.
Remember to sit and think about what you are doing when eating raw carrots. It is easy to choke on raw carrot if you are not chewing carefully and concentrating while eating. Children definitely need their carrots cut into small sticks.
Healthy lunch ideas alone won’t bring good health. The exercise component needs to be factored in. Just as a simple healthy salad is sufficient in providing the nutritional benefits then so is a simple walk every other day for maintaining your physical activity levels.
So three cheers for the carrot with all of its nutritional benefits. Add it to your daily lunch time salad and make sure to take a walk around the block sometime during your day.
Getting started on good health does not need to be anything fancy. The basic salad has to be at the top of the list for healthy lunch ideas.
