Why It Is Crucial For Working Women to Have Healthy Eating Habits
Why are we discussing healthy eating habits just for working women? Why do we need to focus only on working women?
Well, working women tend to have a lot on their plates (pardon the pun!): career, family, kids, self-care, responsibility towards society. In the midst of managing everything, the one thing that is dropped off from their priority list is self-care. Self-care includes everything to do with the overall health from inside out, including healthy eating habits.
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If women continue to let go of healthy eating time and again, it will have a cascading effect on the overall fitness and wellness in the years to follow. A casual error today can become a major roadblock in a woman’s life in the future.
I, too, am a working woman with a full-time job as well as a blog to manage. I can relate to all those working women who find it difficult to make time for their health.
After working full time for 4 years now, I have devised some healthy life hacks which work quite well to make sure I maintain my healthy eating habits.
6 tips to maintain healthy eating habits on weekdays
Always plan in advance:
This is one of the most important factors to ensure we are making the right nutritional choices. If we don’t plan in advance, we will inevitably end up resorting to unhealthy instant processed food that always seems to be readily available.
Some of my healthy eating tips for meal prep:
- Maintain a meal planner/checklist. On weekends, you can complete the checklist as per your preferences, and then you can prepare some of those meals which can be stored well for few days.
- Some of the healthier options which can be prepared in advance are overnight oats, chia pudding, oatmeal cookies, granola bars, frozen smoothie packs, roasted veggies.
- Some of the salad ingredients which can be prepared in advance are boiled chickpeas, kidney beans, chopped veggies, boiled eggs, boiled chicken/salmon/meat.
Grocery list:
Once your meal prep checklist is prepared, make sure to create a grocery list (you can always create a soft copy and keep editing it every week). If we have the necessary ingredients to prep on the weekends, it will save us a lot of time on those busy weekdays.
Carry boxes:
Now that you are done with meal prep and grocery shopping, you need to focus on all the meals you are going to have in office. Here are some healthy eating tips to make sure you are packing the good stuff!
Always carry nutritious food options to your office. You can mix all the chopped veggies and carry it along with a box of salad dressing. And, you would be able to avoid having a pizza or burger at work.
For snacks, you can bring some nuts and seeds and fruits to your office. Pack all this yumminess in your carry box!
Cut-off excess tea/coffee:
We all are quite familiar with the office environment and those countless cups of tea/coffee we don’t even realize we consume in a day. To handle work pressure and stress, some of us find a cup of coffee quite comforting.
My advice would be to reduce the amount of coffee you consume. Moreover, make it a point to not add sugar.
A healthier alternative is Green tea (of course without sugar). Try switching from coffee/regular tea to green tea and you will thank yourself in the future.
Dinner on Weekdays
After a long and tiring day, most of us don’t feel like cooking. One of my go-to dinner options is vegetable curry with some toast. If you did your meal prep on the weekend, you should have chopped up veggies which you can just add to your soup mix.
And there you go, you have a vegetable curry ready in 3-5 minutes. You can always store some vegetable/meat balls as well. Pop some of them in a curry and you are done.
While preparing your weekly meal checklist, always keep in mind to add easy-to-make dinner options.
Learn to find healthy snack ideas for tempting unhealthy food options
We all have food cravings and more often than not, we crave unhealthy junk. What we need to do is try to replace unhealthy choices with healthier ones. Initially, it will be hard to do this but remember why you need to eat healthier! You are doing it for you.
Once you are able to say ‘No’ to your temptations and stay determined to have healthier options, the hard part would be over. And pretty soon, you would realize that it wont even bother you as much.
For instance, chocochip cookies can be swapped with oat flour cookies with unsweetened choco chips. Noodles can be swapped with zucchini noodles. Potato wedges can be swapped with roasted carrots. The possibilities are endless and oh so tasty!!
Just carry these healthy snacks throughout the day with you at work and you are set for the weekdays.
Superfoods-healthy food choices
Below is a small list of healthy food choices
To improve our health, we need to focus on what our deficiencies are and what are some of the must-have superfoods for those deficiencies.
Try and incorporate these healthy food choices in your meals as much as you can:
- Nuts and Seeds: dates, almonds, raisins, walnuts, cashew, chia seeds, flax seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds
- Whole Grains: oats, millets, barley, brown rice, quinoa, whole wheat bread
- Essential Veggies: spinach, celery, cucumber, or any green veggies
- Beans and legumes: chickpeas, red kidney beans, green beans, soybeans, lentils
- Fruits: coconuts, papaya, pomegranates, berries, bananas, grapes, oranges are some of the key fruits we must consume regularly.
Best Sugar Substitute
It can not be stressed enough how bad refined sugar is for our health and every processed food that we buy in our office cafeteria has some amount of refined sugar. Moreover, some of us just can not cut sugar completely off from our diet.
To make things easier for us, we should always keep a sugar substitute handy. You can carry small boxes in your bag and thus totally avoid consuming refined sugar.
Jaggery is one of the best sugar alternatives available. Jaggery can help improve immunity and detoxify our body. Other options can be honey, maple syrup, brown sugar, Stevia, coconut sugar, agave.
Road Ahead
All we need is some motivation and some determination to stay focused on self-care. Learn to prioritize healthy eating as a working woman. As Buddha said
“To keep the body in good health is a duty… otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.”
Just keep working on yourself and you will see rewarding results soon.
Meet Prerna:
A financial analyst by day, an entrepreneur by night, Prerna is passionate about healthy living and leaves no stone unturned to promote a lifestyle focused on nutrition, fitness and wellness. She started her blog to pursue her passion so she can do what she enjoys. One of her main goals is to engage and entertain her readers with her articles.
Prerna lives in India with her husband. And enjoys travelling, exploring new places and cooking healthy desserts. You can follow her here on Pinterest or here on Instagram
