In addition to the actual Thanksgiving dinner being a little different when you are on the whole foods diet, you also need to remember that just being busy can affect what you are able to eat. When you are running low on time, you don’t want to get fast food just because it is easy. Here are some ways to stay whole during a busy holiday season.
Don’t Get Too Complicated
First of all, don’t make all you Thanksgiving and holiday meals too complicated. Sure, there are whole food variations of just about every food imaginable, but these often require a lot more ingredients and take more time. When you aren’t making the actual Thanksgiving dinner, you probably don’t want to spend all day cooking.
Instead of doing that, take some basic fall ingredients and make meals your family can eat on the whole foods diet but that aren’t going to take you hours in the kitchen every day.
Buy Some Pre-Packaged Ingredients
While you don’t want to use processed foods or ingredients with preservatives, there are some pre-packaged foods and ingredients that aren’t too bad to use. For example, instead of having to chop all of the veggies and fruit yourself, consider buying pre-cut versions. These are going to cost a little more, but they can save you tons of time.
Buying carrots that are already peeled and chopped, bags of sliced apples, and containers of diced onions or peppers really helps a lot when you don’t have a lot of time for cooking meals from scratch.
Start Meal Prepping and Planning
Another thing that can help a lot during the busy holiday season is to get into meal prepping and planning. You can spend one day every week doing the grocery shopping and cooking up a storm. This will be a busy cooking day, but you can have friends help and get meals done for the majority of the next week.
Prepare lunches and dinners, or even some breakfasts that are whole food friendly. Try to save some room in your freezer so that you have space for all the foods you are making ahead of time.
Use Your Leftovers
Don’t forget about the joy of leftovers! You can cook a whole chicken on your meal prep day, put the cooked chicken in a container, and create quite a few lunches and dinners throughout the week just with this one chicken. Whenever you have leftovers, save it and think about what else you can make with it. This helps to save you money and time.
