so last month I “participated” in the brown bag challenge, brought about by food network. . . I think that I took my lunch 7 times in the month of September. on the one hand that is horrible since there are an average of 20 working days in a month, take away the holiday, a few sick days and a couple of lunch meetings and I could have stood to brought my lunch at least twice as often. but I’m not beating myself up about it. 7 times last month I brought my lunch, I saved money and most likely ate a more balanced healthy meal and in all honesty that is 7 times more than I have done in probably as many months.
there are a few things that I can do to improve this process moving forward. 1) I need to embrace or at least come to terms with menu planning, preferably by way of making larger dinners so that I can take left-overs. a sandwich every day gets old really fast, even when it is a tasty sandwich with fancy condiments. 2) also related to the whole menu planning, I need to be more organized with my shopping so that I have what I need when I need it. 3) and I really do think that this will help tremendously, I need to prepare what I can the night before. I don’t care for sandwiches that have been sitting in the fridge over night, they get a softness to them that is very unappealing to my palate; but I’m thinking that if my fruit and snacks are ready to go then I’ll feel some obligation to finish the lunch and take it with me. this may be a stretch but then again it may not be. I don’t like leaving things undone and that would be a prime example of doing just that. of course I could always go back to the old standby of taking a frozen dinner to work with me but I grow tired of them extremely quickly and they are LOADED with salt. cheap yes; healthy and satisfying, no.
so that’s where it is. the brown bag challenge was challenging for me but I have not thrown in the towel. I have successfully embraced the fact that the way I go about eating needs to change and while I have not yet worked out all of the details I will. eventually this will all be second nature to me and when someone comments that I’m so “good” about bringing my lunch every day I’ll have more than a story to tell about the journey, even if it is (most likely will be) a story that I choose to keep to myself and simply smile and say yeah, “I found I just like it better this way”.