11 Foods to Avoid During Lunch Hours
We have all been there. You had to hurry through lunch to return to work, but within one hour you are dropping off to sleep at your work desk.
The time savings hardly appears to help once the rest of the day feels like slogging through a swamp to have anything done. The problem is probably your lunch.
Even if you believe you made a healthy choice, it might not have been the best thing to get you through the remainder of the day.
We will let you know what you should stay away from if you wish to keep in top gear, and also how you can go for better lunches.
1. Wraps
There is absolutely nothing inherently bad with wraps, however they provide you with the wrong idea about a reasonable portion size. They are usually filled with double the meat and cheese in a typical sandwich.
Tortillas, although thin, have a lot more calories than are present in two slices of entire wheat bread. Eating an entire wrap can easily bog you down significantly. It is much better to simply eat the sandwich, or slice your wrap in half to eat over 2 meals.
2. Buffet Meals
Buffets may be iffy as you don’t know how long the food is actually sitting there, and the numbers of people have handled it before you arrived.
However a more serious problem is that the extended heating of these foods degrades the nutrients inside and begins to break down the fiber, too.
It is almost as if the food has been partly pre-digested, and because your stomach does not have to work extremely hard to extract glucose from it, your blood glucose will rise. That primes you for a crash just after returning to work.
3. Pasta
Pasta is a filling comfort food, but it is almost all refined carbohydrates. These break down fast in your gut and then leave you feeling both hungry and sleepy again in quite short order.
Your sauce of preference might also contain a huge load of fat, sodium, and sugar, overtaxing the organs and also exacerbating your foggy brained, exhausted state.
Unless you live in a country where siesta is the norm, it is advisable to save pasta dishes for a time when you are free to rest later.
4. Burger & Fries
The majority of fast food combo meals contain almost as many calories as you have to eat in a whole day, and surely top the RDA for sodium.
When you down a burger, soda, and fries, you will be tanked up on the most risky ingredients out there, including saturated fat, sugars, and salt. It stands to reason that your body will struggle as it tries to process all of that stuff.
You are additionally very likely to have painful gas, which is not the top addition to an afternoon staff meeting.
5.Premade Sandwiches
Sandwiches can be a healthy midday meal, however they must be made right. Grocery store or gas station offerings are made to sit in the case for days on end, so the individual components are usually soaked in some kind of chemical preservative.
When you buy a premade sandwich, you also don’t have the opportunity to swap fatty mayo for healthy avocado, or add a couple of nutrient-rich sprouts.
Whenever you make your sandwich at home, you can customize it many ways, and end up with a food that provides the kind of slow burn you need to get through the day.
6. Vegetable Soup
Veggie soups can be nutritious, low calorie foods (provided you choose a low sodium version) however, they aren’t very likely to keep you feeling full till dinner.
Although the veggies are healthy, there is no protein in the soup, and that’s what you have to be satiated until dinnertime. Whenever you get hungry once more after the lunch hour has passed, what do you do? Go to the vending machine.
If soup is your preferred lunch, simply make sure you pick a variety that contains some lean protein, like chicken or turkey. Get an apple or a whole grain roll on the side to incorporate some complex carbohydrates. These days it is a well-balanced meal.
7. Garden Salad
Just like with soup, garden salads don’t provide a wide enough variety of nutrients to be actually filling. You truly need some kind of protein for that. Options such as salmon, white meat chicken, or chickpeas can meet the necessity without busting your diet plan.
However in order to be a truly satisfying meal that will keep you going till 5 , some healthy fats are suggested. Nuts, seeds, and avocado are delicious choices that really make a salad a meal.
8. Granola Bars
Granola bars are extremely convenient if you are unable to leave your desk for lunch, but even with the presence of oats, they are not really nutritious.
Makers depend on sugars to make you feel as though you have been nourished, but with little fiber and protein, granola bars simply can’t provide sustained energy. If you truly can’t get away for lunch very often, look for granola bars made with whole ingredients such as seeds and nuts – these will mean more fiber and protein.
And if you find one with less than 10 grams of sugar per bar, you will stay away from the sugar crash. Even easier than reading all of those product labels is to simply down a quarter cup of your favorite nuts in addition to a serving of fruit.
9. Flavored Yogurt
Yogurt is a sneaky food that is often considered healthy, but will in reality contain as much sugar as a soda. Flavored yogurt likewise possesses very little in the form of fiber or protein.
Plain Greek yogurt is a bit better on the nutritional scale, and a great base for a homemade parfait. Add berries, chopped walnuts, and just a drizzle of honey for a satisfying meal with additional fiber, protein, and healthy fat, but much less sugar.
10. Sugary Drinks
Not just soda, but also energy, fruit, as well as sports drinks come packed with added sugar. You may be tempted to get one to compensate for a nutritionally void lunch, but this can just trap you in a vicious cycle of sugar rush and energy crash and also load you up on a ton of empty calories.
And because calories that are drunk don’t make you feel the exact same way as calories that are eaten, you are very likely to overeat after you finally get to dinnertime. Skip these drinks to also protect yourself from extra weight, kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes, and tooth decay.
11. Co-worker Birthday Cake
Obviously no one would consider birthday cake a real lunch, but diet conscious people might be tempted to skip their real lunch in order to justify the splurge later on. Don’t do it!
You will be getting no nutrients, only a load of sugars and refined white flour that sets you up for an epic crash. Therefore even if you do eventually indulge in some cake, don’t skip lunch. Rather, get that balanced salad we talked about earlier. That should prepare you much better to stick to just one piece of cake.
Between the fast food and soda you already know is a bad choice, the unhealthy foods masquerading as health food, and the healthy choices that aren’t quite balanced enough to be a meal on their own, it is hard to eat healthy food at the office.
We hope we’ve helped you narrow down some better strategies to ensure your body get the optimal balance of healthy fat, fiber, and vitamins to sustain you all afternoon, every afternoon.
