Niçoise Pasta Salad, for Barila/Nimrod Saunders
Most nutrition articles deal with breakfast or late dinners, but lunch is just as important.
Also in terms of its ingredients, but no less in terms of its timing.
Audra Wilson, a registered dietitian at Northwestern Medicine was interviewed by the healthy website and explained that the best time to eat lunch is influenced by an earlier choice in your day - breakfast.
According to her, "Breakfast is essential to ward off intense hunger and is required to stabilize your mood throughout the day. Eating breakfast shortly after waking up helps energize and promotes healthier eating habits. To effectively bridge the gap to lunch, it is essential to avoid snacking after you have already You ate breakfast."
This is what you should eat for lunch if you are trying to lose weight
The best time to eat lunch
Ideally, you should eat lunch four to five hours after eating breakfast to help keep your blood sugar stable.
So, "If you had breakfast at seven in the morning, aim to eat lunch between 11 a.m. and early afternoon," Wilson explains.
If your schedule calls for a later lunch, a small, healthy snack can tide you over until then.
Ideal snacks combine proteins, carbohydrates and healthy fats, such as an apple with a handful of nuts or vegetables together with chickpeas.
The protein, fat and fiber will keep you feeling balanced to prevent you from feeling hungry the next time you eat.
For the main course of lunch, choose meals rich in the same nutrients to prevent hunger until dinner.
Lunch can be a nice salad with some protein, a quinoa bowl loaded with veggies, or turkey and avocado.
All of these provide a good nutritional profile.
And if you're wondering about dinner, try following the same rule of thumb - eating dinner four to five hours after lunch. If an early dinner isn't possible, a light, nutritious snack in the afternoon can help manage hunger until the meal.
In any case, the recommendation is to finish eating three hours before going to bed, so that you can maintain both a normal weight and a stable blood sugar level.
what are we eating?
Lunch must be balanced, and provide the body with everything it needs to continue functioning.
A meal that is insufficient in quantity and quality can cause overeating in the evening, while too heavy a lunch can cause a feeling of fatigue and lack of energy.
Whether you're one of those people who prepares lunch for themselves every day, or one of those people who eats out, lunch should contain plenty of nutritious vegetables, low-fat proteins and fats with a healthy composition, and also a measured amount of carbohydrates.
Enough carbohydrates to energize you, but not an amount that could ruin your diet.
More on the same topic:
diet
Lunch
carbohydrates
proteins