Ask the Experts: What to Eat at Lunchtime to Lose Weight

Lunchtime! You know scarfing down a burger and fries isn't the best choice if you're trying to slim down, but how do you know what is? We've enlisted the expertise of two nutritionists — Stephanie Clarke, RD, and Willow Jarosh, RD, of C&J Nutrition — to share the perfect equation for how to make a delicious and satisfying lunch that will help you lose weight. Follow their advice below to start seeing results.

Source: Shutterstock

Calories

If you're trying to lose weight, aim for the 400-to-450 range. If you're trying to maintain your weight, especially if you work out, aim closer to 500 calories.

Protein

Go for the gold and get 20 to 30 grams of protein, which is about 17 to 25 percent of your lunch calories. A healthy dose of midday protein will help prevent the dreaded afternoon slump and will keep you feeling satisfied post-lunch so you're less likely to reach for sugary pick-me-ups.

Fibre

Shoot for at least eight grams of fibre, which is 30 percent of the daily recommended total of 25 grams per day. Including fibre-rich carbohydrates (whole grains, starchy veggies, and fruit) and fibre-containing fats (nuts and seeds) will help you reach your fibre goals.

Carbs

Yes, you need to eat carbs! Go for 50 to 65 grams, which is 45 to 55 percent of your lunch calories. Carbs offer your brain and your body energy, so skimping can leave you feeling sluggish. Overdoing it can also have the same affect, so stick to this range. Avoid refined carbs, like foods made with white flour and white sugar, and go for whole grains, whole grain breads and pastas, and starchy veggies and fruits.

Sugars

Healthy lunches should have four grams of sugar or fewer, but if you enjoy foods that contain natural sugars (like grapes or dried cranberries in your salad, sweet potato or squash in soups, whole pieces of fruit, or natural sweeteners like maple syrup or honey in sauces or dressings), then aim for fewer than 20 grams of sugar. Be mindful of the hidden sugars in certain products like sandwich bread; read labels, and choose those without added sugars.

Fats

Including healthy fats in your lunch makes your meal more satisfying, so strive for 13 to 18 grams, which is 30 to 35 percent of your total lunch calories. Including healthful sources like nuts, seeds, oils, avocado, and olives can help beat sugar cravings later.

Timing

Enjoy your lunch about one to three hours after your morning snack. If you eat breakfast around 7:30 and your morning snack around 10, aim to eat lunch around 12. Or if you like to exercise at noon, enjoy your lunch when you get back around 1. If you tend to forget to eat because you're so busy, set an alarm on your phone or computer to remind you to stop and nosh!

A Few Examples of Perfect Lunches

Photo: Jenny Sugar

• Sesame Ginger Quinoa Salad With Vanilla Greek Yogurt (5.3 ounces) and Blueberries (1/4 cup):
  Calories: 462
  Total fat: 13.6 g
  Saturated fat: 1.7 g
  Carbs: 58.4 g
  Fibre: 8.1 g
  Sugars: 20.2 g
  Protein: 28.1 g

Photo: Lizzie Fuhr

• Spinach Feta Wrap With a Pear and Raw Almonds (14):
  Calories: 452
  Total fat: 19.5 g
  Saturated fat: 5.1 g
  Carbs: 54.1 g
  Fibre: 12.2 g
  Sugars: 20.4 g
  Protein: 20.5 g

Photo: Jenny Sugar

• Butternut Squash Lentil Soup With a Slice of Whole Wheat Bread Smeared With Avocado (1/4 fruit):
  Calories: 433
  Total fat: 9.5 g
  Saturated fat: 1.6 g
  Carbs: 67 g
  Fibre: 22.4 g
  Sugars: 20.2 g
  Protein: 22.3 g

Photo: Lizzie Fuhr

• Greek-Yogurt Chicken Salad on a Whole Wheat Pita With an Apple and Salted Cashews (10):
  Calories: 483
  Total fat: 14.1 g
  Saturated fat: 3.2 g
  Carbs: 63.8 g
  Fibre: 10.1 g
  Sugars: 22.5 g
  Protein: 29.7 g

Snack Mistakes to Avoid

• Waiting until you're famished: Busy schedules can make hitting that midday meal tough, but avoid heading to lunch when you're starving. Not only will you inhale your lunch quickly and reach for more food because your body hasn't had time to register that it's full, but also, it can also throw off your natural hunger and fullness cues for the rest of the afternoon, which can lead to eating more later in the day.
• Eating out: Do you know how many calories are in that soup and salad you ordered from the cafe? It seems like a healthy lunch, but hidden high-calorie ingredients could make your lunch well over 600 calories. Pack lunch from home so you know exactly how much you're eating.
• Not taking a break: When you mindlessly gobble down your lunch while doing something else like working or watching TV, your mind will be too distracted to be able to fully register each bite, so you'll tend to take in or crave more calories. Get away from your desk, get outside, or eat lunch with a friend.

Source
http://www.popsugar.com.au/fitness/What-Lunch-Eat-Help-Weight-Loss-35986307

Healthy Brown Bag Lunches

Pritikin healthy brown bag lunches not only save you money, they save you loads of calories compared to typical lunch fare. Here's just one example. A Quizno‘s Tuna Melt Sandwich ratchets up a whopping 2,090 calories. Make your own tasty tuna sandwich Pritikin-style (see Tip #1 in this article) for fewer than 400 calories. Yes, you‘ve just erased about 1,600 calories from your diet. Do that every day and you‘d drop about 13 pounds in one month.

Pritikin-style healthy brown bag lunches are much better for you in other ways. A Quizno’s Tuna Melt has 31 grams of artery-busting saturated fat. That’s the equivalent of eating three Big Macs. By contrast, your homemade Pritikin tuna sandwich has less than 1 gram of saturated fat. Oh, how your heart’s gonna love you!

Read on for more tips on making your midday meal scrumptious, money-saving, and healthy. Chances are, you’ll discover some ideas for healthy brown bag lunches for kids, too.

7 Things You Should Pack For A Healthy Lunch

1. Simple, Sensational Sandwiches

Put together a sandwich of tuna (canned – preferably low-sodium, light, and packed in water) with 1 tablespoon nonfat mayo or nonfat plain yogurt, chopped celery, and onions, topped with baby spinach or peppery arugula, on 100% whole-wheat bread.

Or get a great dose of heart-healthy omega 3's by combining salmon (canned, low-sodium) or strips of fresh grilled salmon from last night’s dinner with cucumber, onion, and fresh dill. Stuff into a 100% whole-wheat pita.

Go juicy hamburger-style (and very healthy) with a veggie burger (choose lower-sodium varieties) topped with lettuce, slices of fresh tomato, and mustard in a whole-wheat bun.

2. Veggies, Veggies, Veggies

A veggie-packed lunch gives you lots of food, lots of nutrients, and zippo for calories compared to many other lunch choices. Here are healthy brown bag lunch ideas brimming with crunchy, colorful vegetables.

Fill a big bag of cut-up varieties that you can munch on all day long – baby carrots, celery, radishes, cherry tomatoes, and more. Spice them up, if you want, with a little bean dip. Make your own zesty, low-cal, and inexpensive Mexican-style dip by combining pinto beans, chopped red onion, fresh cilantro leaves, and lime juice in a food processor and blend.

For more veggie goodness, trade your brown bag for a small icebox, like an Igloo, and pack a HUGE salad, like Pritikin Longevity Center alums David and Kathy Heetland of Skokie, Illinois. The couple goes through a bag of greens for lunch a day PLUS, in their salads, diced sweet potatoes, yellow squash, red bell peppers, cucumbers, red cabbage, red onions, and more. Says David: “Pritikin showed us that all kinds of food can go into salads.”

Three heaping cups of salad full of fresh veggies add up to a mere 100 calories.

But boy-oh-boy, don’t let the word “salad” delude you into thinking that all salads are healthy. Three cups of salad with cheese, full-fat dressings, and bacon bits tally up 600 calories and more. The Taco Bell Fiesta Taco Salad packs 860 calories, 46 grams of total fat, 14 grams of which are saturated fat.

For salad dressings that are slimming, use vinegars, lemon juice, fresh salsas, or your own homemade combinations, like wasabi and rice vinegar, Dijon mustard and balsamic vinegar, or fat-free plain yogurt sassed up with a little horseradish.

3. Fruit Galore

Like vegetables, fruits are fabulous weight-loss foods because they’re “big” foods, that is, foods that are bulked up by lots of fiber and water. With “big” foods, you’ll be eating a lot of food (which will satisfy your hunger) but not a lot of calories.

Here’s a great example: For the same number of calories that are in a handful of peanuts (about two ounces), you can eat 2½pounds of strawberries (about five of those green boxes that strawberries come in.) Eating “big” foods like strawberries, salads, and other fruits and vegetables can prevent hunger from taking over and taking you places you don’t want to go.

You can even turn fruit into a delicious sandwich. Combine fresh pineapple chunks with nonfat ricotta cheese. Smooth over a slice of whole-wheat toast. Delish!

4. Wrap It All Up

For “on the go” lunches, keep several types of greens and chopped veggies like carrots, onions, celery, and tomatoes in the fridge.

When you’re ready to leave the house, just spread out a large whole-grain wrap. Lavash bread is a good choice too. Top with greens, veggies, and a little balsamic vinegar or low-cal, low-sodium salad dressing. If you have leftovers like roasted chicken, crabmeat, or turkey breast, add them. Sprinkle with freshly ground black pepper. Roll the wrap up, and you’re out the door with a big, tasty lunch the size of a small football.

5. Thermos Magic

Soup or vegetarian/bean chili made the night before often tastes even better the next day. To keep hot entrees hot, use an insulated wide-mouth thermos.

In several studies at Penn State University, scientists found that people who ate veggie- and grain-rich soups and stews tended to eat significantly fewer calories overall by day’s end than people who didn’t.

6. South of the Border

It’s scary how much belt-busting trouble you can get into at many Mexican restaurants. One cheese enchilada at On the Border Restaurant, Nutrition Action newsletter recently reported, tallies up 1,600 calories and 53 grams of saturated fat. Yes, 53 grams! Think of it as 20 pats of butter.

Take in a fraction of calories (only about 200) and absolutely no sat fat by making your own Mexican-style bowl of corn, black beans, and salsa. Simply combine 1 can of black beans (rinsed and drained), 2 cups of frozen no-salt-added corn kernels (thawed), and 1 cup of fresh salsa.

7. Baked Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Corn – Warm, Yummy, and Very Filling

Think outside the sandwich. A big baked potato topped with a calorie-light dressing like nonfat plain yogurt, mustard, salsa, or nonfat sour cream weighs in at just 300 to 350 calories.

Enjoy the rich flavor of sweet potatoes? While home on Sundays, cook up a batch. Wrap each one in foil and bake for about an hour at 425 degrees F, or until their luscious, sweet juices start to ooze out into the foil. At work the following week, just pop one in the microwave for a quick warm-up. They’re loaded with taste, and they don’t need any extra toppings. Best of all, they REALLY fill you up.

Craving corn on the cob? Easy! Just microwave it, husk and all, for three to five minutes.

Things You Should NOT Pack…

The Dry Stuff

Rid your pantry of all those chips, crackers, goldfish, Cheetos, cookies, trail mix, and other dry snacks that the food industry has packaged of late into petite 100-calorie serving-size bags. What good are they if you’ve got to rip open three or four before you’re feeling full?

All dry foods, even healthier options like pretzels, dried cereals, fat-free chips, and dried fruit, pack a whole lot of calories into very small packages.

Instead, fill up on water-rich, fiber-filled foods like vegetables, fruits, beans, hot cereals, potatoes, corn, yams, whole-wheat pasta, and brown rice. Foods with a lot of water usually provide a lot of stomach-filling volume, but not a lot of calories.

A whole pound of veggies, for example, adds up to a mere 65 to 195 calories. By contrast, a pound of dried cereal or fat-free chips is packed with 1,600 to 1,725 calories.

The Cheesy Stuff

Since 1970, Americans’ consumption of cheese has risen 350%. That’s a huge problem because there’s nothing worse for your heart than cheese because it’s full of artery-injuring saturated fat. “If you want to die early,” Nathan Pritikin said, “eat a lot of cheese.”

Adding just one ounce of American cheese to a sandwich adds six grams of saturated fat (that’s more than you’d get in a McDonald’s Sausage Patty.)

Calorie-Filled Drinks

We’ve become a nation of beverage bloat, and it’s bloating our bodies. The average American drinks 28 ounces of sugary soft drinks a day (nearly 300 calories), which is nearly six ounces more than a decade or two ago, recently reported the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Liquid calories are especially troublesome if you’re trying to lose weight because they do not quell appetite as much as solid foods do.

The good news: If you replace calorie-laden drinks with no-calorie drinks like water, the pounds will melt off. Studying more than 3,000 children and teenagers, researchers at Columbia School of Public Health recently reported that when the kids drank water instead of sugar-sweetened beverages, their total calorie intake dropped an average of 235 calories each day.(Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, April 2009)

Eliminating 235 calories each day could help most people drop about 23 pounds within one year. 23 pounds! And all it took was one simple change: switching to water.

Turn your water into lemonade (and do it very cheaply) by squeezing several slices of lemon into a glass of icy water. Stir in a packet of Splenda, and voila! Tasty lemonade. Great for your wallet. And GREAT for your waistline.

Source
https://www.pritikin.com/your-health/healthy-living/eating-right/986-pritikin-brown-bag-lunches.html#.VTyYACGqqko

How to Pack Lunch for Weight Loss

Pack your lunch and you may have an easier time cutting calories and losing weight, since this allows you more control over the ingredients in your lunch than ordering out at your favorite restaurant. But it can take some practice to pack a lunch that is both filling and low in calories.

Start With a Soup or Salad

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends eating foods that are low in energy density, or calories per gram, to help limit your calorie intake while still eating enough to feel full. These foods, such as broth-based soups or salads, take up a lot of space in your stomach, so you eat less of foods that are higher in calories later in your meal. You'll need to eat 500 fewer calories each day to lose a pound a week, so stocking up on salad greens and soups is a good idea. If you're not full, you're more likely to give in to cravings and eat too many calories to lose weight. Just make sure to keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold to limit the risk of food-borne illnesses.

Increase Fiber With Whole Grains

Swap out your white bread and white rice for 100-percent whole-grain bread and brown or wild rice. Using whole grains will help you increase the amount of fiber in your lunch, and eating more fiber will make you less likely to gain weight or body fat, according to a study published in "The Journal of Nutrition" in January 2009. Fiber also slows the movement of food through your digestive tract, helping you feel full for longer and eat less later in the day.

Add Protein

Include at least one source of lean protein, such as fish, skinless chicken breast or beans, in your lunch. Protein is more filling than either fat or carbohydrates, according to an article published in "The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition" in May 2008. Avoid high-fat and high-sodium protein options and very processed luncheon meats like salami in favor of roasted and sliced lean deli meats when you make sandwiches.

Include Lots of Fruits and Veggies

You'll be able to lower the overall energy density of your lunch if you include lots of fruits and vegetables. Add lettuce, tomato, onion, bell pepper or other vegetables to your sandwiches in place of some of the high-fat cheese or lunch meat. Eat fruit for a sweet ending to your meal instead of cookies or candies. Instead of chips, munch on carrots with hummus or top a small baked potato with salsa for a nutritious side that isn't too high in calories.

Source

• References

• HelpGuide.org: Healthy Weight Loss & Dieting Tips
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Eat More, Weigh Less?
• Diabetes Forecast: How to Eat More but Lose Weight
• The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: Protein, Weight Management, and Satiety
• The Journal of Nutrition: Increasing Total Fiber Intake Reduces Risk of Weight and Fat Gains in Women
• AARP: Pack Your Own Lunch Box
• American Diabetes Association: New and Healthy Brown Bag Lunches

http://www.livestrong.com/article/242619-how-to-pack-lunch-for-weight-loss/

5 Lunches to Make From Dinner Leftovers

Do you ever bring leftovers from dinner for lunch the next day?

They’re a great way to get the most out of your groceries, and this guarantees that you won’t let your food go to waste. Leftovers don’t have the most exciting reputation though; it can admittedly get a little boring when you’re eating the same meal multiple times in a row.
So how do you make boring old leftovers as appetizing and delicious as when you first had them for dinner? Transform them into entirely new meals! There are plenty of easy recipes for dinner that are great for turning into just-as-easy lunches. The following are 5 ideas of ways to use last night’s leftovers to create interesting, yummy and satisfying lunches:

  Flank Steak for dinner = a Steak & Cheese for lunch

Leftover steak from the night before? Simply take a hoagie roll and pile on the sliced steak, along with whatever cheese you have in the fridge for an incredibly easy steak and cheese sandwich. If you have time to sauté mushrooms and onions you can kick up your sandwich even more, as well as add some nutritional benefits.

Spaghetti and Meatballs for dinner = Meatball Subs for lunch

If you have leftover spaghetti and meatballs, dig out the meatballs and sauce and place on a soft hoagie roll for a hearty meatball sub lunch. Top with provolone or parmesan cheese for the full, gooey sub experience and pack a green salad as a healthy, lighter side dish.

Tortellini for dinner = Pasta Salad for lunch 

Tortellini, and pasta in general, makes a great leftover lunch food since it’s just as good eaten cold as it is eaten piping hot. Mix up your leftover tortellini with some light mayonnaise or olive oil and lots of chopped up veggies for a fresh and simple pasta salad that’s perfect for a light lunch.

Roast Chicken for dinner = Chicken Tacos for lunch 

Leftover chicken can be used for all kinds of things, from sandwiches and wraps to salads and soups, but packing chicken tacos for lunch takes leftover chicken to another level. Shred some leftover chicken, wrap it up in small tortillas and throw some shredded cheese, lettuce, salsa and sour cream into the lunchbox for a fun build-your-own taco lunch.

 Grilled Vegetables for dinner = Pizza Toppings for lunch 

If your kids didn’t eat all of their veggies for dinner last night, try putting the leftovers on an English muffin pizza the next day. They’re easy to heat up in the toaster oven or microwave, but if there’s no heat available, cold pizza is still yummy (just melt the cheese the night before). Chop up your leftover veggies and sprinkle over an English muffin covered with tomato sauce and cheese

Source
http://www.easylunchboxes.com/blog/5-lunches-to-make-from-dinner-leftovers/