3 Healthy Meal Ideas When You’re Busy

Eating healthy and being busy…. two seemingly conflicting things, am I right? It took me the longest time to figure out how to eat healthy, even when I am crazy busy.  But I finally learned how to win with it, because I am not going to let “being busy” stop me from being healthy! So I wanted to share those tips with you!

Smoothies.

So fast, just pour some coconut water, rice milk or hemp milk into the blender, then throw in your fruits AND some veggies (spinach, cucumber, romaine lettuce just to name a few). Add some protein if you like (hemp seed or chia seed, or maybe a scoop of hemp protein powder) and some healthy fats (avocado, coconut milk – and the proteins I mentioned before also have you covered on the healthy-fat front!).

For extra flavor add some vanilla extract, or dash of cinnamon.

Salads.

Chop up a bunch of lettuce – romaine or red leaf – and add some spinach. Pile on some other veggies – tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, radishes, sliced beets, bell peppers, onions…. whatever you like.

Add some protein. Choose pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, cooked organic chicken breast, kidney beans, sprouts, a hard boiled egg, or salmon or tuna.

Make a quick dressing with stone-ground mustard, olive oil, and a couple sprays of Bragg’s Amino Acids (or just a bit of sea salt if you don’t have Bragg’s or can’t find it). Toss it all together and eat.

If you chop the veggies in bulk you can make a couple salads at a time, don’t add the dressing to them yet, and they usually last a couple days.

Know where you can get healthy take-out.

This could be from a nearby restaurant (I love my local Vietnamese restaurant and it’s really close and inexpensive) or you could find a place like Snap Kitchen, here in Austin, which I recently explored and am now in love with. They prepare healthy food to go. I stopped by this morning and picked up a couple dishes to tide me over the next few days. They have organic and locally sourced produce, organic chicken, and free-range grass-fed beef and bison. Their portions will keep you on track but you can also get a medium or large size meal if you want to have extra leftovers.

No it’s not quite as cheap as buying and preparing it yourself but if you are a busy person (OR you just don’t enjoy cooking) and would just spend the money on junky fast food or pizza delivery, then it’s a much better value in the long run.

It’s always the small habits that add up – don’t let yourself fall back into old habits that cause you to not feel so great! I’d love to hear from you, too – what do you like to eat when you are really busy?