Transitioning to a Whole Food Plant-Based Diet – Week 3 (Lunch)

This week you are going to:

1. Continue your weekly meal planning and shopping (this week you’re shopping for whole food plant-based [WFPB] breakfasts, snacks and now lunches).
2. Continue eating a WFPB breakfast every day.
3. Start batch cooking your lunches.
4. Start eating a WFPB lunch every day.
5. Keep track of your progress using this daily survey.
6. Throw out or give away all of your unhealthy breakfast foods if you haven’t already done so.
7. Start thinking about some WFPB dinner options for next week.
8. Continue stocking your pantry with healthy staples.
9. Buy some additional kitchen gadgets like a crockpot or blender if you feel they would be helpful.

Lunch

For some of us, lunch is a routine meal and pretty similar from day to day.  For others, this is not the case.  If you like more variety at lunch than you do for breakfast, you will need to find multiple options for lunch that are WFPB.

Whether or note you eat lunch at home or at work, it is much easier to eat WFPB if you make it yourself.

It is strongly recommended that you learn to cook in batches so that you ALWAYS have a WFPB meal ready to warm up for those times when you don’t feel like cooking or don’t have time.

One way to cook in batches is to have a mixture of grains and legumes that you cook every 1-2 weeks.  These can be packaged into ten one-serving containers, putting eight in the freezer and the other two in the fridge.  After using one or two from the fridge, these can be replaced from the freezer.  In this way, you will always have the base of your go-to lunch ready to heat up quickly.

The remainder of the meal consists of vegetables or greens that can be cooked slightly on top of the rice/beans as they are heated in the microwave.  Finally you can add an assortment of raw fruit and/or vegetables on top.

Another approach is to make a large pot of soup AND a large bean or grain-based salad every weekend that will last for several lunches.  You can then also pack these to eat at work.

Here are a couple of easy recipes to get you going:

1. Quick Black Bean Salad
2. Couscous and Kale Salad

IMPORTANT: By the end of week 3, get rid of all your remaining ‘bad’ food and snacks !

Click here for week 4: Dinner