I can’t eat a healthy diet because I’m too busy

Today, we’ll tackle that popular excuse: “I can’t eat a healthy diet because I’m too busy to faff around preparing complicated meals.”

There’s a huge range of calorie-counted products available in shops, from sandwiches to ready-meals. These can be very useful if you’re in a real rush, but no-one needs to live on them to lose weight. Healthy, diet-friendly meals can be quick and easy to prepare.

Lunch

Get up five minutes earlier – hardly a huge challenge! – and make a sandwich for lunch. Go for granary bread and low-fat fillings (ham, cream cheese, salad or prawns all work well.) Grab a couple of pieces of fruit and a cereal bar to go with it, either from home or from your stash of snacks at work.

If your lunches are starting to get monotonous, check out my lunch tips or the suggested lunches on the recipe pages.

Dinner

Plenty of tasty, healthy, meals take only ten-fifteen minutes to prepare. Pasta is ideal: just make sure you weigh out your portion (50-80g dried weight, depending how many calories you’re eating). You don’t need to tip an artificially sweet shop-bought sauce over your pasta – try chopping onion and mushrooms, frying them with just a spray of low-fat oil, and adding a small tin of shop bought tomatoes. By the time the sauce is done, the pasta should have finished cooking.

Rice or noodles are also great options – especially with vegetable stir-fry. You can even buy ready-chopped veg, most supermarkets do a range of these.

I’ve got more detailed instructions for pasta with tomato, bacon and veg sauce and vegetable stir-fry with noodles on the recipe pages. – along with a few other quick and easy dinner ideas.

Excuse busted – now take action!

This weekend, take ten minutes to think about meals for next week, and write a shopping list. Stock up your cupboards so that you won’t come home starving on Monday and make a beeline for the nearest takeaway.