Healthy lunch for a healthy body

By Katelyn Acton Hogan

Do you know the importance of a healthy lunch? Let’s see what can help you to pack a lunch that is good for you.

PREPARATION AND ORGANISATION ARE TWO KEY STEPS IN ACHIEVING A HEALTHY LUNCH!

  • As a generation in today’s world, finding time is a difficult one! Being prepared and organised are two essential aspects to ensure that your time is used wisely to benefit you and your body.
  • For many, finding time to eat a healthy lunch is difficult, whether at home or in work. Sometimes lunch meals are looked at as “not important”, whereas in fact we eat one-third of our daily calories (female 600 kcals) and (male 750 kcals) during our lunch hour. Therefore it is critical that you find ways to ensure nutritious lunch ideas are met.

WHAT IS A HEALTHY BALANCED DIET?

According to the NHS, a healthy balanced diet can be defined as including and eating a wide variety of foods in the correct proportions and consuming the right amount of food and drink to achieve and maintain a healthy body weight each different per person. E.g., Active female teenager vs working 50-year-old male. It is believed that a healthy balanced diet leads to good health in the future, energy boost and helps you feel at your best.

Let’s us be real here: we are what we eat, aren’t we?!

To ensure we eat a wide-ranging of foods, macronutrients are the body of this. e.g.

Carbohydrate’s: Bread slices, baps, wraps, pitta bread, rolls crackers or rice cakes (wholemeal and wholegrain options at all possible).

Proteins: Meats like ham, turkey, chicken, tuna, salmon and other options like egg and nuts as a protein snack.

Vitamins: General speaking most vitamin sources come from fruit and vegetables, so any fruit like banana, strawberries, oranges (easily accessible), dried fruit like raisins, mangos and fresh vegetables like carrot sticks, peppers.

Minerals: Calcium is one vital mineral needed in the diet, sources in the diet for lunch ideas would be pots of yoghurts, drinks, milk cartons, cheese, and butter.

LUNCH IDEAS:

Select one per column:

Carbohydrates Fruit/Vegetable Meat source Calcium source
Wholegrain brown bread Banana Tuna Low-fat cheese
Wholemeal pitta bread Strawberries Chicken Vanilla yoghurt
Wholegrain bap Carrot sticks Ham Carton of milk

 

HOMEMADE LUNCHES COMPARED TO DELI BOUGHT LUNCHES:

Lunch comparisons Calories (kcal) Fat (g) Saturates (g) Fibre (g) Salt (g)
Ham, cheese, coleslaw baguette from deli 662 kcal 31.2 g 12.4 g 3.5 g 4.0 g
Homemade red lentil. Carrot, chilli soup

 

 88 kcal 3.3 g 0.4 g 2.1 g 0.6 g