Are you in the office, home office or on the road a lot and always have your hands full? Your lunch often falls by the wayside or, despite your good intentions, you end up grabbing a roll from the bakery, a pizza or a kebab? Many people often find themselves in a stressful situation, especially at lunch, and a vicious circle of suboptimal foods and a midday slump begins. The good news is: There are many simple alternatives for lunch that save time, taste delicious and fill the second half of the day with lasting energy.
Healthy recipes for everyday lunch? Make it stress-free and uncomplicated!
When it comes to good eating habits, many people's everyday situations are often challenging. Especially at lunch, things often fail due to the hectic pace of the day and unforeseen situations and tasks. Working people working from home or at work have difficulty eating an uncomplicated, healthy lunch. But even for people who look after children or those who have sporting and aesthetic goals, the lunch break often feels too short to eat an energy-supporting lunch.
In fact, this perception often only arises from a lack of the right tools, know-how and preparation. You can put together a healthy lunch in almost any situation - even without meal prep. How this works will now be explained.
What does a healthy lunch actually consist of?
First of all, it's about the definition of a healthy lunch. This can vary greatly given today's nutritional trends and different opinions. Based on current scientific findings and what practice shows, the healthy lunch is defined here as follows:
The healthy lunch always consists of one good source of protein (Fish, meat, eggs or alternatives such as rice-almond or sunflower protein e.g. sunflower mince), Vegetables (carrot, cucumber, broccoli, lettuce, zucchini...), a small amount good fat (virgin oils, avocado, nuts...) and depending on body fat percentage and activity level long chain carbohydrates (potato, quinoa, red rice, millet...) are added.
The following applies: The lower the Body fat percentage - especially around the middle of the body, the higher the muscle mass and the more you move in everyday life, the more useful carbohydrates are for lunch. Accordingly, people who sit a lot (e.g. in the home office) and people with more body fat around the middle should not eat carbohydrates for lunch. This has a lot to do with that Blood sugar management to do.
In addition, general instructions (which also apply to other meals) should be observed:
The food should be gut-friendly, accordingly no allergens How gluten , Cow's milk products or Antinutrients contain, be sugar-free and, if possible, of natural origin (no industrially processed fats, additives, additional sugar, etc.). Intestinal irritants also disrupt blood sugar and high blood sugar at midday leads to the well-known midday low. Many people know the feeling after a plate of pasta. Protein and vegetables, on the other hand, saturate and stabilize blood sugar.
Your healthy lunch – as an athlete, in the office, on the go – how does it work?
The first thing to remember here is: Be prepared. You should at least try to plan ahead and perhaps think about what the week will look like on Sunday and accordingly Do meal prep . If you already have a prepared, healthy lunch made of protein, vegetables and good fat during your lunch break, you save time and stress.
Of course, there are always situations that happen to you unforeseen, or you are on the road and have no opportunity to organize a delicious, healthy lunch. People often think way too far and complicated, but in fact there are very simple solutions that you can put together with simple components from the supermarket. Here are two examples of such a quick, healthy lunch:
- 1 pack of beef ham (protein), lettuce (vegetables), olives (fat), cucumber, salt, pepper, virgin olive oil (fat) and optionally rice cakes (carbohydrates): Spread the beef ham on a plate, the leaf lettuce, a few slices Spread the cucumber and olives over it, then season with salt, pepper and olive oil and, if necessary, snack on the rice cakes.
- Vegetarian: 2-4 hard-boiled eggs (protein), 1 pack of snack carrots (vegetables/fiber), a handful of nuts (fat) and optional buckwheat slices (buckwheat crackers, gluten-free) as a carbohydrate source.
Of course, these are not elaborate gourmet menus, but they are tasty and are a quick solution for a healthy lunch in hectic everyday situations. Of course, as already mentioned, it usually makes sense to cook lunch in advance.
Healthy lunch recipes
It is efficient and useful to prepare several meals in one evening or on the weekend for a healthy lunch. This means you can pre-cook these in larger quantities, for example for three portions in one go, and store them in Tupperware containers in the fridge.
In principle, you can put together lunch using a modular system:
-
protein Select source:
Meat (e.g. beef ham, ground beef, pastrami, chicken breast, cooked chicken breast cold cuts, turkey, game, etc.), fish (salmon, trout, tuna, sea bass, etc.), egg, sunflower or jackfruit mince or in the form of a shake, e.g. rice protein or almond protein (called almond flour in retail stores). Then boil, bake or fry the protein source if necessary. -
The right Vegetable source choose:
If necessary, boil or chop broccoli, lettuce, cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, fennel, kohlrabi, etc. -
Good Source of fat choose:
Nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios, pecans, etc.) or avocado, virgin vegetable oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter, grass-fed butter or seeds. -
Good carbohydrates choose (only if necessary, see above):
Quinoa, potato, rice, rice noodles, rice cakes, gluten-free bread, sweet potato, millet, buckwheat noodles and so on.
A resulting healthy lunch with chicken could look like this:
Fry chicken breast strips, season and pack into a Tupperware container along with lettuce, nuts and some avocado. If you want to enjoy carbohydrates with it, you can cook a few potatoes with it. These also taste good cold and contain resistant starch after cooling anyway, so the carbohydrates have less of an impact on blood sugar.
Another simple example recipe for a healthy lunch with eggs, which is great for the home office, but also in the office because it doesn't need to be warmed up, looks like this:
Image & text from: "Fit@Home" by Ines Schulz © Jochen Arndt and publisher: GU
Image: Jochen Arndt and publisher: GU
The recipe is also suitable as healthy lunch to go when you're on the go.
In mine Book “FIT@HOME” You can find numerous other lunch recipes of this type, as well as many tips and tools for easy meal prep and organizing healthy meals. The book is available in all bookstores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as in numerous online shops.
Healthy lunch to lose weight - healthy lunch low carb
In the construction kit shown above you can quickly see that you can easily put together a healthy, light lunch that is low in carbohydrates:
A very simple example would be boiled broccoli with a little virgin olive oil and a salmon fillet fried in grass-fed butter.
Whatever works great and is ideal for on the go is a sandwich made from low carb bread with some grass-fed butter, turkey breast, beef ham or smoked salmon with a lettuce leaf and some vegan pesto. You could also snack on some dark (at least 90% cocoa content) chocolate and a few berries for dessert.
Low carb shirataki noodles made from konjac flour are also perfectly filling.
If you are looking for a healthy, low-calorie lunch, you can conjure up a delicious minced beef Bolognese with these pasta, which only consists of fiber, and use it with the ready-made low-carb pasta as a healthy lunch for work.
Quick healthy lunch for the Thermomix, microwave or pan
In principle, everything that is prepared can be briefly warmed up in various devices. The microwave should be more of an emergency solution, as many valuable vitamins are destroyed there. However, it is still a better solution than eating junk food. All of the dishes described above that are eaten warm can easily be warmed up briefly in the pan. If you have a Thermomix, you can generally make meal prep a lot easier, so you don't have to cook at all.
Simple healthy lunch – also possible vegetarian or vegan
Of course you can also do it without meat or without animal products at all. What you should generally pay attention to from a health perspective in order to avoid a nutrient deficiency can be found in the respective blog articles vegan diet or vegetarian diet read up!
The Cashew Lemon Bowl with Egg above is a simple vegetarian example recipe. With egg dishes you have a healthy lunch that is vegetarian. Sheep and goat cheese or feta is also a good source of protein and fat for vegetarians if the intestines are healthy. With the construction kit above you can easily put together a vegan lunch: Soak the sunflower mince according to the instructions beforehand, then fry it in the pan with olive oil, add small chopped vegetables of your choice and chopped onions and then pour in the pureed tomatoes. If carbohydrates are on the agenda, buckwheat noodles are a suitable side dish.
Conclusion on a healthy lunch
A healthy lunch consists of high-quality food Protein, vegetables, good fats and possibly long chain carbon hydrates, as long as you move enough and have little body fat around your middle.
You can put together a lunch like this from a simple list of suitable foods. It's best to prepare the dishes in advance using meal prep so that you don't end up in a stressful situation at lunchtime.
If that doesn't work, there is a simple solution for putting together a healthy lunch from food in the supermarket. By the way: A healthy lunch for children should contain the same components, but carbohydrates can always be on the plan.
