Welcome to episode number forty-seven of The Raw Food Podcast. I am your host Laura-Jane the Rawtarian, and in today’s episode we are talking about quick and easy lunches. Particularly for those of you who are on the go, trying to get kids out the door or getting yourself out the door. So the bulk of this episode is actually be talking about trying to get it together, to propel yourself to prepare a healthy quick and easy lunch. We know that actually taking the time to do that is one of the biggest challenges and that’s what I’ll be talking about most. So stay tune and we’re going to talk all about it shortly.

Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the Raw Food podcast. Of course, today we are talking about quick and easy lunches! And to give you an overview of what I'm planning on talking about, I am going to give you ideas for what to bring, particularly for lunch at work, or if you have access to a lunch room at your office. So that's the subject of this episode!

However what I’m really going to be focusing on is all those environmental things that are going to help you actually get your quick and easy healthy lunch in the morning. I have confidence in you and know you have your own good ideas for a great lunch, so it’s just a matter of getting it together!

Some examples of what we’re going to talk about will be mental preparation, especially planning the night before, repetition and how you can maybe bring the same lunch a few days in a row, then we will talk about making lunches in an office lunch room and on the go lunches for the hungry traveler.

Ultimately I just really want to stress, and this is not only for your healthy lunch but every meal of the day, if you can be mentally prepared and know what you are going to eat for the following meal that will help you out so much. A “mind hack” if you would, because one of my passions is sharing information with you not just about recipes, but about life surrounding food as well.

As an example, I want to share an interesting psychology study that I recently looked into about apples versus cookies. In a 2011 study done at Carnegie Mellon University, a group of researchers brought a bunch of people into a room and posed them this question: “We’re going to be here a couple of days, so we want you to decide upon a snack for tomorrow. Do you want an apple or a cookie for tomorrow’s snack?” This was of course what the study was about, but the participants didn’t know that.

What they discovered was the majority of participants said they wanted an apple for a snack tomorrow, because they were preparing for something they would eat tomorrow as opposed to an impulse decision whether or not to have the apple or cookie in that moment. The idea is that it’s so much easier for us to make healthy decisions when the choice was made a long time ago, even as short as a day!

The idea is if we can mentally decide what we’ll be eating tomorrow, whether it’s packing your own lunch or going to your favorite grocery store and buying a delicious salad with red onions and mandarin oranges, the act of making that decision ahead of time will make it easier for you to commit to it. The act of preparing ahead of time helps in making healthier decisions for yourself. Not to mention preparing your lunch the night before means more time in the morning to get ready for the day, without worrying about what you’ll be eating a few hours later.

Often it’s hard in the moment to go have something healthy compared to fast food. If you’re with your co-workers and someone says “Hey let’s get pizza for lunch” and you already planned your meal, it’s easy to say “No thanks, I got this delicious healthy meal.” If you don’t have that set-up ahead of time, you’re more like to go “Oh well, I didn’t make any plans anyway, so sure let’s get pizza!

Not that there’s anything wrong with pizza, but my point is that these everyday routines, the grooves you get into, will help make a difference in your eating habits. Ideally this groove involves making lunch the night before, but the most important part is constantly preparing for what you will eat. It also helps you avoid snacks that will ruin your appetite, because you got a delicious raw vegan lasagna already in your head. This preparation is the key to healthy eating.

So that’s the first thing I wanted to talk about. Now the second thing, which is the idea of repetition, it kind of goes hand in hand with the first subject of planning.

We don’t want to be obsessing about food all day and planning our meals and spending too much of our time. Life is short, days are short and there’s so many fun exciting things we could be doing instead! So consider that it might be okay to repeat the same couple lunches over the week to cut down the stress, especially if you’re packing for yourself and not your kids (who may be fussier about eating the same thing every day.) It’s about allowing yourself to have the same meal a few times in the week to make life simpler.

At the last office job I had my go to meal was a simple avocado-tomato-carrot salad, which I would eat all the time because of how easy it was to make. I worked near a grocery store on my way to work, so I would drop in, get what I need and make it in my lunch room. If that sounds good to you, the recipe is on my site at therawtarian.com if you search “salad for lunch” or “lunch salad.”

I mention repetition because the more you repeat and the more you get used to it, the less the poor gray cells in your head get used up making all these different choices. Our brains on average make 35,000 decisions a day and so giving them a break and putting them on auto-pilot is helpful. It becomes innate and natural, making the process in your mind simpler. Even a simple green salad can be perfect, if you want to put just a couple handfuls of spinach, some chopped carrots and snap peas into a Ziploc bag and then have your dressing in a Tupperware container.

If you want to hear more about this then I suggest giving a listen to episode thirty-two, “Decision Free Living”, which is all about the importance of mental processing. Creating a few go-to recipes and using them over and over will cut back on time and produce less headaches about lunch.

So I’m going to give you some ideas, but it’s ultimately up to you to decide what’s quick, easy and healthy for you. After all, your idea may be a salad with sauerkraut, chopped cabbage and pine nuts, with homemade pesto and I would never think of that in my own routine!

With those key points said and done, I’m going to first focus on the lunch room crowd and then go into lunch ideas for those of you always on the go – not just to work, but even to school or university.

Now I was a bit of a slacker and never really got organized before when making my lunch salad, so I had an easy back-up plan for those days. I would just pop into the store on my way to work, buy a big tomato and avocado, have a fresh carrot from home with me, and then just carry that all to work. Of course I’d also bring along a snack that’s easy to carry and doesn’t require much effort to pack, like a couple oranges or bananas. I’d prepare it all in the lunch room and that worked fine for me – it doesn’t sound very sexy, but it is convenient.

Additionally keeping snacks at the office is essential too. I would normally keep a bag of apples or oranges in the lunch room fridge, while keeping almonds or Lärabars at my desk and so it made it easy not to worry about getting hungry because there was something already to snack on. Just that small planning can make your hectic mornings so much easier to get through!

If I had more time then ideally I’d make the salad at home and bring it in a big Tupperware. I’d throw in the dry-ish things, like chopped celery, chopped carrots, spinach, etcetera, and keep my dressing on the side in a separate container. Any other topping should definitely be on the side because no one likes a soggy salad, but you still want something exciting on all that green.

Another thing that worked very well for me was access to raw vegan crackers, mostly because they’re so portable. I don’t tend to eat them a lot, but I normally just keep them in the freezer and use a food processor to dehydrate the nuts and veggies. The higher fat content means they freeze beautifully and you can practically eat it right there and then, making them super handy! You can even use an avocado as spread for the cracker, making them even tastier for a quick snack.

For more ideas I highly recommend checking out my easy entrée recipes at therawtarian.com, just by going under the Recipes section. There are simple ideas, like a five minute spaghetti dish, and more advanced ones that require using a food processer – all these things can make a great lunch room experience.

The practical gist is you want to make a quick and easy healthy meal that doesn’t require a lot of time to prepare, but also still fills you up. Nobody can really exist and perform well when they’re hungry, so making sure your green salad has some substance and nutrition to it is in equal parts important. We want to make healthy decisions, while not getting abnormally hungry at the same time.

Now one thing that could be a good idea, but that you need to consider if viable for you, are smoothies in the lunch room. For starters you need to make sure you have access to a blender during the lunch hour, but also keep in mind that you may have co-workers who won’t appreciate the loud noise while they’re eating their own meals. Leftover smoothies from the morning rush could work, but personally I always found that they don’t taste as good when they aren’t fresh.

However that is a nice segue to talking about those of you who are on the go, or on the road, and don’t have access to that lunch room.

When it comes to smoothies in that scenario, I definitely consider it a great option. The important thing is to keep is as fresh as possible if you don’t plan on having it until later in the day. Maybe a couple hours after you make it will be fine, but if you’re working some crazy 16 hour day then that smoothie will get funky fast in your car. This similarly applies to those in university, who might make double what you normally drink in the morning.

I have heard of Tupperware drink containers that have a small ball in the middle, which would help you to shake and stir the smoothie if it separates or settles. I’ve never used one myself, but I’d love to hear if anyone has positive experiences with those. There are also small blenders that have screw top containers, like the NurtiBullet or Ninja, so those are good for anyone on the go as well.

Again I’ve never been in those situations so I haven’t explored it much, but these are just general common sense tips that could make healthy eating a lot easier. Having a Ziploc bag of nuts, or even an apple or banana, is also a smart idea because of the simplicity involved. I wouldn’t recommend oranges however, just because they could get messy and juicy with the peeling. Not very ideal if you’re driving around for sure. Raw soups can be great too if you put them into a container.

So I think that’s all I really wanted to say. I know I haven’t really gone over the quick and easy lunches too much for the road, but I’m confident that you know both what you like and what works for your routine. There are so many recipes you can adapt to your lunch needs easily, so it’s a matter of thinking about what works best for you.

Ultimately I think the most important part is to get into the routine and ritual of actually packing your meal the night before, or mentally preparing yourself for your next meal ahead of time. Once you create that routine, you’ll find it’s very easy to stick to and change up to whatever you feel you may need.

Before I go let me leave you with a few extra tips here. Keeping healthy food available and close by is key, especially with snacks. Again, just a few bars at your desk or some fruits in the lunch room fridge will do wonders for your lunch time. Try to see if you have a grocery store you can stop by during lunch or the night before and just plan what you would like to have tomorrow.

With getting into my own routines and preparation, one of my goals for this year was to be more organized and I found some great help for that online with the FlyLady. She has all these house-cleaning tips and one of the things I really liked, that I think lends itself to all areas of your life, was the suggestion of a morning and bed time routine. Even if you need to write it down, committing your memory to that will help you maintain a flow you can just keep going with.

This doesn’t have to just involve writing down what you plan to eat, but even if you have things you know you have to do before you go to bed or leave in the morning. I definitely encourage you to give it a try with the lunches – write down whatever you need to make your quick and easy lunch, make sure you get those things and you’ll find these routines will be incredibly helpful to regular healthy lunches.

So I am Laura-Jane The Rawtarian, thank you so much for being here with me. I am always interested to hear what you would like to have me talk about on the podcast. I hope to have some more interviews as well coming up this year on the podcast with some of your favorite raw-foodies, so watch out for that. And, as always, thank you so much for being here with me and I will talk to you soon.

Welcome to episode number 45 of The Raw Food Podcast. I’m your host Laura-Jane the Rawtarian and on today’s episode we are going to be talking all about the psychology of eating and some really practical useful tips that you can take back home into your life and really implement to help you make better food choices. Did you know that we make over 200 choices every single day about what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, all this good stuff. So we are going to talk particularly a lot about snacking and why we snack and how to make some better snacking choices and at the end we are going to really dig into some interesting psychological facts about plate size and even the color of your plate and how that impacts what you are putting on it. So stay tuned and I will be back with you shortly.

Today we are talking about the psychology of eating it is something that we probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about but the psychology of what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, is something that we are all actively practicing everyday whether we want to acknowledge it or not. The reason that I wanted to talk about this topic today actually came out of a conversation that just happened with my husband.

We were talking about a guest that we had over and we had all been sitting around the table chatting just like you do when you have family or friends over. There was a whole bunch of food on the table kind of reminiscing from dinner and one of them was just a bowl of baby carrots. My husband is not a fan of carrots. I don’t know why, I don’t know what is wrong. He is a really great eater but just carrots in particular he always says they taste like soap! He doesn’t really like them. What he was telling me the other day was that he said, “Do you remember when we had that person over for dinner? There was a bowl of carrots on the table, and I just kept snacking on the baby carrots in conversation. Normally I don’t like carrots, and that was weird.” He was saying how he ate all the carrots that were just kind of sitting there in the bowl but he doesn’t even like carrots.

He thought that was interesting, and that of course piqued my interest: that was odd, why did you eat all the carrots? But just in terms of, snacking and why we do these funny things, like eat a bowl of something that we don’t even particularly like. So anyway this all kind of got me talking and thinking about the psychology of eating. You may have heard me talking in the past episode about mindless eating and decision making or decision free life style actually where I talked about how there is every day we are making about 35,000 decisions from, should I hit the snooze, how much longer can I sleep, to what should I eat, what should I wear, what should I do today, all these decisions every day and about maybe 200 decisions that we make every day really to food. So we are actually making a lot of decisions. Sometimes unconsciously, you might be doing your work and thinking, “Do I need a snack or should I pull open that drawer and get something else?” So it is actually something that we are thinking about a lot of times.

So the main focus of this episode today is where I am going to talk a little bit about snacking as some of the psychology behind snacking and then I am also going to just brighten it up a little bit and share some of the tit bit’s that I learned from reading this really great book called “Mindless Eating” by Dr. Brian Wansink. He is a researcher at Cornell University and he really digs into all of these issues in terms of why we eat, what we eat and how to make some environmental changes in life and daily habit’s to help us eat the kinds of things that we want to eat. I might as well jump in and talk a little bit about snacking and some other tips that I learned from doing some research in anticipation of recording this for you.

One of the really key things that I learned about in terms of psychology in eating and snacking is the kind of concept about, our brain really wants to achieve goals. Usually our brain, it is kind of wired to say okay, “I am starting this project. My goal is to finish this project.” Usually that is very helpful when you are getting up the kitchen or mowing the lawn. Your brain is kind of wired to want to finish something and that is normally a good thing but when we think about snacking and eating, our brain is still in that goal oriented mode and is kind of like, “We have opened this tube of Pringles and my goal is to finish eating the entire package” and of course that is not a conscious goal but our brain, when it starts something it really likes to go all the way and it seeks that completion of the project. So eating the whole tube of Pringles as the goal, so not only are we sort of battling the fact that it tastes good and we like snacking and all those things, but also when it comes to packaging and finishing a portion that is in front of us, we are actually having to also battle this goal oriented nature that our brain is used to doing.

One of the key things we can do with that is to not necessarily bring out a whole package of whatever the things, like not even talking about the raw world, I don’t have to talk about Pringles, you know those big tubs of Medjool Dates, probably not a good idea to bring the tub with you at your desk because subconsciously, unconsciously you are going to, your brain is just going to go on auto pilot and feel like it should finish the whole container and that is probably not a good idea for anyone. Even though dates are delicious but they are actually very filling too. So really the idea here of course, so instead of bringing in the whole tub you might want to think okay maybe I will put six dates in a little bowl and bring that to my desk and then your brain is still going to think, “I should finish this goal” which is to eat your six or finish your plate kind of thing, finish all the six date. So that is a really key psychological thing that you can put into practice. So avoid taking the whole container with you and try to put something in a little bowl and of course that kind of makes you more aware too because you are going to, “Oops, I hit the bottom of the bowl and run out and think. Do I want more?” If you do then go for it and get some more but I think the idea here is to put some boundaries on your eating when you think that they are wanted. So I like that idea in terms of the packaging and I think I have certainly heard that before but I haven’t thought about it through the lens of the psychology, what I sort of just explained there. So that was one thing.

Another really interesting thing that I wanted to look into as well is, you will probably like this especially if you work on the computer a lot like I do. I find when I have something challenging, it really helps me to have some sort of bite sized snack, somehow it helps me focus or I don’t know what it is, I mean a habit of having a snack at my computer. So I did a little bit of research into the, “Why do you want to have a snack?” By snack I kind of mean some little bite sized thing to help you concentrate. So there definitely is some research behind this in terms of having little bite size snacks of something. When you have a little bite sized chunk of something it actually produces, doesn’t really even matter what the things is, it could be a bowl of candies or it could be a bowl of grapes, whatever the thing is, when you take a little bite sized snack of something whatever it is, it actually releases some dopamine in your brain which basically sort of releases a feeling a pleasure in your brain and that dopamine release is also related to I believe it is like learning and concentration. It kind of makes the learning and concentration easier when you have more dopamine floating around in your brain.

So it kind of makes sense that you might want, especially when you are doing something that requires a lot of concentration that you want to have that extra set of dopamine release in your brain. So I can understand it’s okay to have a snack but the idea is well if we can have some sort of plate sized thing that is going to give you that release and it is not necessarily like sugar craving or salty craving or a fat craving, it’s not necessarily to do with what you are actually snacking on, it could be or it could be that you are hungry. There are a lot of other reasons but based strictly on this idea of, especially when you are wanting to concentrate on something, you can get some sort of bite size thing and of course I can give you a million ideas like chop a big watermelon into little bite sized pieces or raisons, cherries, grapes, frozen grapes, nuts, seeds, you know what I can go on forever about this. But basically the idea is sure give yourself a bite size more so over something but try to make it something that is healthy of course. I think that is really interesting. I think really the most interesting component about it is particularly if you are trying to concentrate and you are not even really caring so much about what the thing is that you are eating then why not choose something healthy.

Another tangent that I was reading about in terms of snacking and, it kind of goes against what I was just saying before, but there was a couple of rules that I read online and one that was the idea that you should not be snacking unless you are feeling a little bit hungry. So of course you are reaching for a snack and you are not hungry at all well then why are you doing that? It could be because you want some help with concentration or there could be a million reasons but so one right here is to stop and think if you are having a craving, well why do you want it? Is it because you are hungry or you are bored or what is the issue that.

And this is something I have talked about in the past episodes as well. I haven’t brushed up on this so let me think because I find it really helpful. There are three reasons that people will eat. I believe one is because you are hungry. Two is because you are in a habit maybe always on your coffee break at work. You always eat during that time. The third one might be because you are bored and you don’t know what to do so you are eating.

So there are three different reasons that you might be eating in a general sense in this topic that we are talking about right now kind of reminds me of that as well. I think when you are snacking it is good to think about, “Am I hungry that is why I need a snack or bored? I always snack when I am at the computer” What is the deal here. Like I said I read a tip saying that you shouldn’t snack unless you are actually hungry and I am sure if you can make that work for you, I love you and tell me how that is working for you. The other good tip as well and again this kind of goes in the phase of what we were talking about before where snacking actually helps you concentrate is if you are going to snack, try not to snack while you are just doing the work or watching TV. Don’t do it mindlessly because you could really snack a lot. So the idea there is basically if you are hungry and you need a snack, well focus on what you are eating and maybe stop your work and have a little snack and then go back to it.

Now I do love to snack at my desk so I don’t know if that is a super practical thing that you might want to put into place. I think it is a great idea but it may be hard to actually execute but it is generally an interesting concept. So that is another one. I think that is kind of some of the main things that I learned about snacking and psychology. I thought they were quite interesting but now I want to move into just a couple of other not necessarily pertaining to snacking but just general concepts that were talked about in this book called mindless eating. They are actually both related to plate, the type of plate or bowl that you are using. Again these are not necessarily game changing, life changing tips but there are some of things that you can think about and actually probably when you are listening to this, it will just be useful stuff to file away in the back of your brain to kind of be just aware of going forward.

The first one would be the size of your plate, so the general gist here is if you are serving food for yourself or your families, when you are using a big plate and you put a little dollop of something on it, it looks a little bit sad and you are like, “Oh man, let me get some more food on that plate.” The bigger your plate is, the more food you are naturally going to load on that plate for yourself or other people in your house. This is important because when you are in particularly serving yourself, on average people tend to eat 92% of what they serve themselves, kind of whether they are serving themselves little or a lot so it is quiet important in terms of the amount of the food that you set in front of yourself to eat. It is really good to know, if you have a gigantic plate in your house and that is what you have always had and what you are using then it might be an idea to get some smaller plates or to try to get into the habit of reaching for the smaller plate when you are serving something.

You know me, I am not one for to try to starve yourself or eating super low calorie diets but I am really a proponent or let’s change the environment, let’s make some things that are going to make it easier for you to achieve the goals that you want and to eat healthy, feel better, more energized and all of that good stuff. So basically plate size is really important and that of course goes for bowls and cups and all kinds of things because I do consider myself somewhat of a food photographer. I actually love to have a lot of different plates in different sizes and different kind of random mishmash of plates and things in my kitchen and I really enjoy selecting different sized plates or like having a little bunch of bowls for my meal instead of like one gigantic plate. So they can be kind of a fun thing too as long as it does not make too many dishes for you.

Another interesting one was related to color and contrast. So picture this let’s say you have a nice medium sized white plate and you are going to load that full of let’s say alfredo pasta, so of course alfredo pasta is creamy in color. So you have got white pasta on a white plate on average people are going to put way more pasta on that plate because it kind of just all blends together. It’s hard to tell what is on the plate and generally when you are putting the same color of food on a plate, you are just going to load it up way more.

This is in comparison to let’s pretend you had a red plate like a really super vibrant red plate and then you are going to slope some fettuccini alfredo on that and you are actually going to put less because you can really see like, “I can see this pasta, it looks great, it looks delicious, it’s really taking up space on the plate. That is actually due to the contrast, the color contract between the white and the red. This is not something that you really live your life by but interesting again another reminder of all these things that come to play every day when we are just trying to figure out what to serve ourselves and what to eat.

So that was really interesting too. This book called mindless eating actually read it probably, maybe two years ago, again by Dr. Brian Wansink and he is some sort of PhD in food psychology. It really is a small book it is really easy to read kind of goes over interesting detail, not too scientific about some of these studies. It is quite interesting so I hope this has been helpful to you and let me just analyze going back to my story from the beginning here about my husband and his carrot chumping even he doesn’t like carrots. I think the idea there was really that we were all have a good conversation. It was kind of when you do work on your computer or watching TV you are not necessarily thinking about it. You are just reaching for whatever is in front of you and munching away.

So this is kind of a classic example of try baby carrots instead of candy or popcorn which doesn’t sound really exciting but when you are doing it quite mindlessly and just kind of mowing down whatever is in front of you. Just give it a try in terms of something healthy instead of the delicious snack that you might otherwise reach for. I also do this with drinking water at my desk.

Somehow I have gotten into a wonderfully good habit of, somehow I had a huge cup and with a big fancy straw in it and I also put water at my desk and I never think about drinking but somehow I keep slamming that water back all day long. That is my mindless way of getting a lot of water into my body. I wasn’t really thinking about it at all. So the idea here is we are making 200 food decision every day and it is kind of a battle we have got not only will power that we are dealing with but also our in grain habit’s, psychology and all that stuff so if this is any interest to you, I definitely recommend that book or just do a little bit of Google searching with all this stuff there is really fascinating articles and studies that there are and all that stuff. So I hope that has been helpful. Thank you so much for joining me and I will talk to you next time.

You have been listening to the Raw Food Podcast, with your host The Rawtarian. Be sure to visit me at www.therawtarian.com where you can browse over 100 of my absolute favorite, simple satisfying raw vegan recipes that you’ll find pretty quick to make and with just a few ingredients and that taste spectacular. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for my newsletter, and once you’ve signed up for that you’ll get a PDF copy of 11 of my most favorite, most satisfying, most delicious recipes, including raw vegan alfredo sauce, raw brownies, and a whole host of other delicious recipes you can make at home that are raw and tastes amazing. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope to hear from you very soon. And until next time, enjoy your raw adventure.