It’s almost the end of our Weight Loss on a Budget Challenge so I just have a few more tips.  Today’s Tip #27: Bring Your Lunch From Home.
There are 3 major benefits to bringing your lunch to work or while you are out.
- Saving Money – Buying your lunch everyday can be very expensive. Â The cheaper options (dollar menus for example) tend to be very convenient, but also FULL of empty calories, fatty meats and simple carbs. Â You can save money by planning out your meals according to your daily budget. Â Create your own healthy meal plan with low cost items like greek yogurt, low sodium deli meat, cereal, bulk items (nuts, beans, etc), cottage cheese, apples, oranges, protein shakes, etc.
- Calorie Control and Healthy Ingredients – When your make your lunch, you know exactly what’s in it. Â You will have selected the ingredients and you’ll know how the food was prepared. Â Also, you will have already considered things like calories and the nutritional value (vitamins, fiber, etc). Â If you have a calorie goal for the day, it’s easier to stay on track because youl know in advance what your calorie counts should be.
- Portion Control – When you order your lunch, sometimes you may not be aware of what the true portion size is for what you’re eating because you’re on the run. Â You may think you’re eating 1 serving of a food when you are really eating 4 servings. Â That’s because there are so many great restaurants out there that have huge portions that don’t work for people who want to cut back to lose weight. Â In the end, you may feel like you’re getting a deal on food, but you are sabotaging your weight loss efforts with those huge portions. Â In addition, many of us were raised to eat everything on our plates, so the thought of not eating what we just paid top dollar for doesn’t compute. Â Thus we end up eating more food than we need to. Â That leads to guilt because we don’t want to “waste” food, so we eat it. Â When you make your own lunch, you can better control how much food you eat.
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