Wondering How To Eat Healthy With No Time? These Are Our Tips!
Are you someone who always says “I don’t have time to eat”? Maybe you have no time to eat at work or the time for lunch at work is really short? Maybe you feel like you have both no time AND no money to be able to eat healthy? If any of these sound like you, you are totally not alone – we get you!
If you want to know how to eat healthy with a busy schedule, we’ve got some experience at that. We’re certainly not experts, but we have a very busy day (we work from home) and sometimes we felt like we just don’t have time to cook! We wondered how to eat healthy without cooking and we found one way – which we will mention below!
Eat A Salad
Full disclosure – we love salad. You might be thinking “salads suck”, but not OUR salads. We actually wrote an entire article on why we basically eat a salad every day for lunch. Salads are great because you do not have to cook anything. Just chop and wash a bunch of vegetables, mix in a dressing, serve, and eat. Simple.
As we mention in our article, we sometimes do up a bit of bacon in our salads but the time to prep it is really short. Better yet, cook up any meat you want to add the night before (like cut up chick breast), store it in the fridge, and add it to the salad the next day!
We usually do a kale and spinach salad which helps us get a ton of raw green vegetables in and the time to make it next to nothing. Just remember to make a salad with flavors and ingredients that you actually enjoy. Also make sure to watch the dressing since it can add a surprising amount of sugar and/or fat if it’s store bought!
Meal Prep on Sundays
One of the biggest things that you can do (and that we also kind of do) is make use of the time that you DO have. Even though any time that you have off you want to spend probably not doing more “work”, cooking on Sunday CAN help you to eat healthier throughout the week AND save you some time.
If you meal prep and cook healthy dishes that can be refrigerated in Tupperware (or even frozen) then you can ensure that you eat somewhat healthy during the week. This means that you are less likely to buy something/order-in or choose a lunch or dinner item that is unhealthy – like basically any pre-made meal or fast food. This part also saves you money.
Find some easy-to-prepare meals that you don’t mind eating more than once during a week – like a simple chicken stir fry with rice and vegetables. Prepared right, this is a healthy and filling meal that takes only a bit of time to warm up when you need it during the week!
Use Frozen Vegetables
If you don’t feel like meal prepping, then using frozen vegetables is another easy way to cut down your cooking time. While in some cases frozen vegetables might have slightly less nutritional value because they were frozen, they are still a lot better than grabbing fast food on the way home.
Also, if you know you need vegetables to cook with in the evening, take a few out and place them in a bowl in the fridge so they can thaw during the day but stay cool. Usually they are pre-cut and pre-washed as well so this is also a time saver as they can go right into the pan/pot!
Make Double the Food
This is something we basically always do when we cook. When we make dinner, we almost always plan to have leftovers so that we can eat them for lunch the next day.
This takes the guesswork out of cooking and preparing something for lunch AND we know that it’s healthy since we ate it the night before. You just have to heat it up again and usually that means it’s on the plate ready to eat in less than 10 minutes.
The trick with this one is that you need good containers for the fridge that you can store the leftovers in. We have ones like these – glass bottom and snap lids. This way you make sure that the food stays fresh and doesn’t leak or spill in the fridge overnight!
Have a Few “Go-to” Meals
This one is loosely related to the above tips but we think that it’s important. In our experience, having a few healthy meals that you love and have the ingredients for at home can make a huge difference.
It’s important that you also really, really enjoy these meals. This way you are more likely to make them even when you are short on time or feeling exhausted. You also know how to prepare them since you have cooked them many times before.
This will really cut down your food prep time since you know what you’re doing. You only need to have like 3 to 5 of them, but this way, you have a roster of meals that you can just make at any time.
Along with these meals, it’s important to try to have the ingredients necessary to make it always at the ready. If you have a rice-based dish and you know you are short on rice, grab some on the way home. This way, you can make the meal (if you need to) and not have the excuse that “you was out of rice”. Make sense?
Our go-to healthy meal is probably a vegetable stir-fry. Basically throw vegetables into a saucepan with onion, add a sauce (usually tomato paste), and cook a grain (usually rice) with it. Done. Simple, and healthy. It doesn’t even take that long form start to finish!
And there you have it – just a few tips to tell you about how we manage to maintain a relatively healthy diet with limited time just like everyone else! In the end, these might not work for you exactly as we outlined since everyone is different and going to have various wants, preferences, and time available.
We just wanted to give you a template for how we approach healthy meal prep for the week so that you might get inspired for what works for you!
As always, Stay Curious,
-B&L
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