I’ve made two breakthroughs with regards to food recently that I wanted to share with you all.
Soup is a wonderful food!–I’ve been on a quest lately to find fast, filling, nutritious foods to eat for lunch lately. I want them to be fast because I don’t like to spend a lot of my kids’ nap time wasting time eating. I want “me time”: time to run, nap, clean, read, hangout on the couch, etc. A lot of people have mentioned soup as a good “diet food,” so I thought I’d give it a try. A can of soup ranges in calories from about 240 to about 400 depending on if it’s cream based or broth based. Most soups (despite their high sodium content) have a good mix of protein, carbs, and fat. Many contain a fair amount of fiber also and they’re totally filling. So lately, I put on a can of soup, make the kids lunches while it’s heating up, and then sit down together and eat. I don’t feel like I have to eat their food, we spend time together, and I get my “me time” in the afternoon. They don’t feel like diet foods to me, they feel like real foods!
Food is for fuel–Several times in the past week, I’ve been going about my day, doing my things, happy as a clam. Then, I’ve realized that I haven’t eaten very much (because I’m really at a new point where I only eat when I’m hungry) AND that I’ve got a huge energy expenditure coming up (usually a run). For example, I just finished my lunch that I wasn’t really hungry for because in about an hour, I have a 7-mile tempo run scheduled. It’s the hardest run of the week, and I have to be hydrated and fueled before I start or it will be a terrible experience. I can’t really remember a time in my life when I’ve thought about “food as fuel” instead of “food as comfort” or “food as time filler” or “food as stress reliever.” It’s all good progress in my book!
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Ah, soup – all the vegetables of a salad, but great taste, too!
An even cheaper and lower-sodium way to love soup is to make it yourself in big batches (I use the crock pot), bag it in quart-size freezer bags, freeze them, and then pick your frozen, homemade-so-you-know-exactly-what-went-into-it soup for lunch. If you need specific stuff like protein, throw a lot of beans in the batch.
(This method has also saved me on a few weeknights when we’re hungry and it’s 6pm and nothing’s been planned for dinner – frozen soup to the rescue.)
Congrats on the breakthroughs!
Soup is only next to coffee as the liquid of the gods. I make a soup just about every day and indeed, it’s filling, yummy and healthy too.
My favorite easy lunch food are the little cans of tuna kixed with a little bit of miracle whip and sweet relish. +Definitely makes me look forward to lunch.
mm, I love it! I’m a big soup fan too. Progresso chicken noodle or chicken dumplings are my favorite among the prepared soups. I also like making soup a lot myself, and it totally is cheap and can be way better than the canned stuff. I make a lot of faux jambalaya (rice, sausage, beans, veggies in a chicken broth) and chicken-whatever-I-have-around with chicken that I’ve poached in chicken broth and then shredded.
Another great low-cal but filling food I’ve been enjoying recently is oatmeal. Instant oats are good enough, but the real steel cut oats are where it’s at. You can cook up a bunch at the beginning of the week and it will keep for a week in tupperware. Then, just nuke some daily. I just add in cinnamon and some kind of berries, but you can adjust the stuff you put in in order to get the right calorie number. Ideas: sugar, butter, dried berries, frozen berries, bananas, different spices, cream, milk, etc
as far as tuna, I mix mine up with dijon mustard these days. Still yummy and adds lots of flavor, but the caloric impact is low.
I’ve never been able to get full from soup for some reason. I’ve made it at home, had the sodium-packed garbage that comes in cans–none of it has ever filled me up. Perhaps there is something pyschological going on here.
However, apples, grapes and peanut butter are my newest best friends. They’re filling, nutritious and they taste great.
I’m a huge fan of soup. Fortunately, nowadays it’s not difficult to find a really good and really healthy soup. It’s quick, convenient, good for you and filling. If you have time to make a really good stew, go for it. Just throw the broth, veggies and meat into the slow-cooker and forget about it. Several hours later you’ll have nutritious and delicious stew, and in quantity, too. It reheats nicely, so it can last you a few days.
Working long and odd hours as I do, I have no choice but to adhere to the “food is fuel” mentality. Sometimes I’m just shoveling more coal onto the fire to keep it burning. In primitive times this was our natural relationship with food. In current times, food has become entertainment and/or the basis for social interactions (along with booze and coffee). We live in the real world, so a total commitment to the “food is fuel” approach is probably not realistic, but maybe we can embrace it during the week and save the “food is fun” concept for the weekend barbecues.
I love Amy’s soups. They’ve actually gotten me back into soup. Try the Chili or the Black Bean Vegetable. Organic and very tasty, but a little expensive…
Also, the Vegetarian Slow Cooker Cookbook is awesome for larger batches.
Yeah Soup! Double Yeah homemade soup.
One of my favorite quick meals is a grain based salad. To fix bulghur, just add some water and let it sit. Add a few veggies. Kasha (buckwheat) is as fast a white rice. I cook extra brown rice for salad lunches.
These pack better than most soups and even though I love soup, I like having a good second option.