8 Time-Saving Tips for Healthier Eating Habits

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Related Episodes:

• Mindless Snacking
• Being Too Busy and Your Eating Habits

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Full Episode Transcript:

8 Time-Saving Tips for Healthier Eating Habits

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. Most likely if you’re listening to this show, you’re a fairly busy woman and have a desire to change your eating habits but could benefit from some tips to help you fit it into your schedule a little more easily. I mean, who doesn’t want to save a little time, right? Even if you aren’t jam-packing your day with work meetings, chores, appointments, activities, all the things. Having some ways to make developing healthier eating habits less time-consuming is always a good thing.

One of the things I see career women struggle with regarding trying to change their eating habits is that feeling rushed for time prevents them from choosing that healthier option. Instead, it’s usually the quickest option. Oftentimes that means something like a candy bar for lunch or a few slices of pizza for dinner instead of the chicken and veggies that were originally the intention.

When you discover that choosing the healthier option doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to take a lot of time, it’s so much easier for your brain to choose the healthier option. There’s less friction there.

Right now, your brain may already be in the habit of thinking that healthier means more time. Therefore, by default, it will continue to go for the convenient, less healthy food.

So, in this episode today, I’m sharing 8 time-saving tips for healthier eating habits whether you’re in a rush, or you’re not in a rush. Because saving some time, means having some extra time to do things you love.

I’m going to start out with breakfast and work my way through the meals of the day. Breakfast is one of those meals that can feel very rushed for career women, so often you may find yourself grabbing coffee and a pastry on your way to work, instead of coffee and a healthier food at home. If this happens, it’s usually on the weekdays, because of work, but even weekends can feel rushed if you must be somewhere by a certain time.

The best way to form healthier breakfast eating habits, is to make your morning feel less rushed when it comes to breakfast.

An easy way to do this, is to set out some of your breakfast items ahead of time. Meaning, the night before.

So for example, if you eat cereal for breakfast, set out your bowl, spoon, and glass. Even your cereal box if you already know which one. If you eat toast, set out your plate, knife, and the loaf of bread. If you eat yogurt with blueberries on top, set out the bowl, spoon, and glass for water. Get your coffee maker ready or fill your teapot with water and get out your mug and a spoon. You get the idea.

Whatever it is that you eat or drink in the morning, make the morning a little easier by setting out a few items, so you feel like half of breakfast is already done.

It may not seem like you’re saving much time by doing this, but what happens is, your brain has less to process in the morning when you’re in a rush. Just knowing that you have a few less things to take out of cabinets, makes it easier. And easier, means more likely to eat breakfast at home rather than stop somewhere.

So, saving that little bit of time in the morning, even if it’s just a minute, will ultimately encourage you to make the healthier choice by eating at home.

My husband Paul and I always prep the coffee maker in the evening. It’s now a habit since we’ve done it so often at around the same time every night. Also, we make sure the teapot has water in it for oatmeal the next morning. Those simple things that take minimal effort, make our mornings easier and not rushed.

We both work from home, so no, we don’t have to drive into work, but each of us likes to start work early, so we still like to streamline our mornings.

Okay, so onto tip number two for breakfast. If you’re really wanting to save some time in the morning with breakfast, then go for the perfect on-the-go breakfast, which is something high in protein and some carbs. My recommendation for this would be a protein bar that has about 20 grams of protein and a piece of fruit.

For the protein bar, I would recommend trying to get one with minimal added sugar if you can. Some protein bars have sugar that is from fruit such as fig, which is a common one that also helps to bind the protein bar, so just take a look at the ingredient list to see if the sugar is from a more natural source, or if it’s refined sugar and just how much. You’re going to want to try to shoot for less than 10 grams of sugar per bar in general.

I eat No Cow protein bars, which have 20 grams of protein and 1 gram of sugar. They are dairy free, but we mostly eat them because they are high in protein, low in sugar and they’re also high in fiber.

Fruit will have the carbohydrates your body and brain needs to start your day, and fiber. Fiber is just one of the healthiest things you can put into your body.

If you’d rather not choose the protein bar, then Greek yogurt is high in protein. Usually somewhere around 16 grams of protein for just a cup of yogurt. You can even buy the large container of plain Greek yogurt and put it into individual smaller containers, so you can just grab it from your fridge in the morning and go.

Alright, moving onto snacks.

I don’t know about you, but I love snacks. Snacks are one of the things that you can easily develop less than healthy eating habits with though. That’s because of several different reasons, but one of which is that there are way too many snacks out there that are so tempting, right? From cookies, to crackers, to chips. They serve the purpose of providing that instant gratification and satisfying that hunger quickly, plus they taste delicious.

If you’re trying to develop better snacking habits, then having some healthier snacks that are quick options are going to help you significantly. Oftentimes, when you start to feel hungry in between meals, you can tend to gravitate toward the snack that is super convenient, which can often be the vending machine snack or the snacks that someone has brought into the office, which tend to be desserts. At least that’s been my experience in the past. It’s always the cookies and muffins.

So, this tip will make healthier snacks easy, plus kind of fun. What you can do is take some small containers, preferably with compartments, line them up on the counter, and fill each compartment or a portion of the container with different healthy finger snacks.

For example, nuts, grapes, blueberries, cubes of cheese. So you’ll take the nuts and fill a compartment in each container down the whole line, then move onto the grapes, etc. These are just examples…you can use whichever snack foods you’d like but try to stick with more natural foods like these ones, rather than processed foods like goldfish crackers, as delicious as they are.

Another idea is you could put baby carrots on one side and cream cheese to dip them in on the other side. I like to mix in some dill and onion powder into whipped cream cheese for a yummy dip.

When you prep all the containers at once, it just streamlines the process and you’re set for several days or even the entire week, for snacks. It takes less than 10 minutes to do this too, but after a few weeks of doing it, you’ll move more quickly, and you’ll find that it will take only about 5 minutes.

Alright, so my big lunch tip is going to be similar to the snack one, in that you’ll invest minimal time, but have several healthier lunches for work.

What I recommend doing is just like with you did with snacks, make an assembly line on your kitchen counter. You can make simple wraps with veggies, a protein, and maybe some dressing or a condiment. The protein can be beans, deli meat, chicken, whatever you’d like. You can do sandwiches, and you can even do a salad with a protein on top like a packet of tuna, some roasted chickpeas or tofu cubes, or a piece of chicken breast or thigh.

If you wanted to use chicken for lunches, I recommend just cooking a few up on maybe a weekend evening, so you have them for lunches for the upcoming week. Or, if you happen to be making dinner that includes chicken breast or thighs, then just cook several extra pieces, so you have them for lunches. Super easy.

So, you’ll line up your pieces of foil or your containers, then start assembling each one, one ingredient at a time. This will take you about 10 minutes to do a few lunches. So much easier on your brain to do the assembly line, because you’re just making the effort once every few days or once a week, rather than feeling like you’re making the effort every day to make your lunch.

And if you have an ingredient like a slice of tomato that might make the bread soggy, then just slice up the tomatoes and stick them in a container, so you can just grab a slice to put on your sandwich for that day. For the salads, you probably won’t want to put on the dressing until right before you leave for work, rather than putting the dressing on several days earlier.  Just a little helpful tip.

If you work remotely, it’s a little easier to make healthier choices when it comes to lunch, but if you want to save some time so you have more free time during your lunch break, then definitely do the assembly line and make those lunches ahead of time, or at least as much as you can.

Okay, so onto dinner. I have several time-saving tips for healthier eating habits for dinners. Dinner is the meal that career women tend to want to save time on the most, because they often work late, or even had a stressful day at work, so the thought of making a dinner that takes an hour, is just mentally exhausting and eats up a lot of time.

I’m all about quick, but healthy dinners. Especially in the summer and early fall when the weather is still quite lovely here in Rhode Island and we want to spend a lot of time outdoors after work, rather than being inside cooking.

These tips can be done all year round though, to save you lots of time.

So, tip number one for dinner, is to double or even triple the recipe. This saves you time because every time you go to cook something, you have some prep and clean-up to do, right? Prep, meaning taking out bowls, ingredients, pots, pans, etc.

If you’re only prepping once and cleaning up once, but making 2-3 meals out of that, then you’re saving time overall. You don’t need to eat that same meal two or three nights in a row, either. Most cooked food will keep in the refrigerator for at least a few days. Also, you could even freeze some of it for the following week or even the following month.

Once you start making a habit of this, you’ll have a refrigerator and freezer full of various meals to choose from, to just heat up. I’ve even known some people who will buy another freezer for down in their basement, just for meals that they’ve frozen for the future, for those nights they just don’t feel like cooking, or they have a lot going on.

My husband Paul and I almost always make dinner for 4 when it’s just the two of us. That way, on our busier nights, we know we have something we can heat up instead of being persuaded to just go get a pizza or takeout. I’m telling you; this works so well.

If you’re not used to cooking, then I recommend doubling a recipe first, instead of tripling it. You’ll basically just be doing a little more chopping or slicing. If something must be cooked on a stovetop and I can’t fit it all in one pot or pain, I’ll just use two.

My next tip to save time for healthier dinners, is to master a few simple recipes and rotate through them, so you get faster and faster at making them. I’m sure you’ve noticed that trying a recipe for the first time takes a heck of a lot longer than a meal that you’ve cooked multiple times. That’s just because practice makes us more efficient. You may even still need to have the recipe in front of you, because you haven’t memorized the amounts of each ingredient completely, but it still goes a lot more quickly.

We have our go-to meals, especially for the nicer weather months where we really want to save time. These meals we don’t even need a recipe to glance at because we’ve memorized them. The key though if you really want to memorize a recipe is to choose one that has less than 10 ingredients and preferably one that doesn’t weird amounts of ingredients, such as ¾ teaspoon of a spice. It’s way easier if the recipe calls for 1 teaspoon or tablespoon of something, know what I mean?

But like I said, you don’t have to memorize the recipe over time, you can still have it in front of you just for reference if you need to, but you’ll find that after making that same recipe several times, you’ll be moving much quicker than you did the first and second time you made it.

You may even try mastering a few recipes for each season, so you don’t feel like you’re eating the same things every week or every other week, all year round. We usually have meals we make frequently in the summer and meals we make frequently in the winter. That way, by the time we start getting tired of some of the summer meals, we’re starting to make some of the winter ones. We might have to look at the recipe since we hadn’t made them since last winter, but the speed comes back quickly.

Alright, so the next tip is to elicit some help in the kitchen. If you have a partner, or a child or teen, ask them for help, even if it’s just something easy like setting the table or getting some of the ingredients out for you. This can save several minutes and to your brain, can feel like a massive help.

Sometimes, when we have lots of small tasks to do, it can feel a little overwhelming, especially after a long day. So, if you can knock a few of those small tasks off by asking someone else to help, then it’s going to take a bit of the load off.

If you don’t have anyone to help, invite a friend over who you know enjoys cooking. Then, return the favor to that person. It can turn a chore into a nice evening with a friend.

My friend, Kacie and I used to do this when we were both single. I was working 50-80 hours a week at the hospital, and she was working as an attorney, so we used to invite each other over for dinner usually about once a week, but we would end up helping each other with the meal. It was nice friend time and made making dinner so much less of a chore. Plus, at least on those nights, I wasn’t eating two bowls of cereal for dinner or a bowl of pasta, like I was a lot of other nights.

Plus, she introduced me to some new healthy ingredients I had never really eaten before. And of course, you can end up getting some great new recipes to make at home on your own.

This next tip, I’ll be honest, I keep forgetting to personally do. Maybe now that I said that I’ll remember. But what you can do is, put a bowl on the counter and use it for any garbage you have from preparing and cooking dinner, so you don’t have to keep going over to the other side of the kitchen, or under the sink to throw something out. Alternatively, you can bring the garbage can over to you, and even the recycling bin if you have one.

It just eliminates the extra effort and time spent going to the garbage every time you have something to throw out or recycle. If you need to rinse the recyclables first, then put a bowl on the counter for recyclables, so you can collect them in the process, then while your food is cooking, bring the bowl to the sink, rinse and recycle them.

So, I hope you found several of these tips helpful and ones that you think you might give a try. If you’re able to and you aren’t doing something like driving right now, jot down the ones you think you might want to try, since I went through several and it’ll be easy to forget them. Or you can also print the episode transcript from the episode page, so you have the tips on paper.

Start thinking of what enjoyable things you’ll do with the free time you’ll be saving with these tips. Thank you so much for listening in today. Take care and I’ll talk with you soon.