With the summer holidays already archived, it is time to resume the daily routine and it is never easy to fit in all the commitments and activities of the day. Returning to the office, at this time also from agile work for many, can be a source of great stress and this often falls on the diet with the risk of starting or returning to bad habits. It frequently happens, in fact, that due to haste or disorganisation one or more meals are skipped, mostly breakfast and lunch, with the consequent increase in stress factors.
Not eating for many hours, especially immediately after the forced overnight fast, can reduce alertness and the ability to concentrate, as well as often causing the appearance of unpleasant gastrointestinal complaints such as burning, reflux and abdominal bloating. This triggers a vicious circle that can only increase nervousness and fatigue.
To interrupt this process, some simple solutions come to our aid that can be prepared in advance or quickly to make meals quick, but at the same time tasty, nutritious and complete.
“To start the day with taste and energy, for breakfast you can, for example, prepare one or two pieces of toast made from slices of cereal bread with mixed seeds, apple slices, bacon and fontina cheese. All of this can be cooked on the griddle or in a frying pan for a few minutes, just long enough to brown the bread and melt the cheese. The apple is a fruit that pairs wonderfully with savoury flavours, and the combination with speck is found, in fact, in many traditional recipes, but almost never proposed for the first meal of the day. The combined consumption of toast ingredients ensures both a balance of nutrients, as well as satiety and palatability. Ideally, breakfast should always be eaten seated at the table and in a leisurely manner, but toast also lends itself very well to being taken with you on the journey from home to the office, especially if you walk to take advantage of every opportunity to move around a bit and reduce the time spent sitting, another stress factor that should not be underestimated,” said Erminia Ebner, nutritionist biologist.
Lunch at the office or at home in smart working can also become a source of tension due to the short time available for both preparation and consumption. This sometimes means giving up the break altogether or limiting oneself to the bare minimum with a few snacks ‘nibbled’ in a hurry in front of the PC. In this way, however, one often chooses incomplete and unbalanced solutions that, in most cases, exclude entire food categories that are fundamental to a healthy diet such as vegetables and fruit. To solve this dilemma, mixed salads, which constitute real one-dish meals, come to us with recipes that are often rich in imagination and taste.
“A quick and easy lunch idea that can be packed the night before and stored in the fridge is a diced salad.
To make it, you need spelt, lentils, songino, rocket and lots of diced carrots, salami and kiwi. Everything can be dressed raw with extra virgin olive oil (flavoured with spices or herbs), added at the time of consumption. Rich above all in fibre and iron, even a small portion of this salad satiates and provides the right energy to face the afternoon hours in the office, those that suffer most from the tiredness accumulated in the first part of the day and the ever-shortening daylight hours. The kiwi is a fruit rich in substances with digestive power that allow faster utilisation of the valuable animal proteins of the salami and vegetable proteins of the lentils. It is also a source of ascorbic acid, i.e. vitamin C, which aids the absorption of the heme iron of hunter salami and the non-heme iron that lentils and rocket are rich in,’ Dr Ebner concluded.
