Everyone needs to eat, but some meals are more of a chore than a pleasure. Like the breakfast you rushed through or skipped altogether – because who has time to make an effort first thing? Or the dinner you put together based on what happens to be sitting in the fridge.
You can be forgiven for grabbing breakfast on the go. While relying on a potluck gamble in the evening can probably be overlooked, but that's as far as it goes.
Neglecting your lunch is not so easy to justify.
Let's make it extra clear – lunch matters. It's an incredibly important meal for so many reasons. Yes, you need fuel to feed your brain and nutrients to help maintain health. And without food to give energy, the risk of nodding off at your desk around 3 o'clock is pretty high.
Even so, there's still more to lunch than all these sensible, practical, and rational reasons.
Food can be fun, delicious, mind-blowing, exciting, nurturing and more, and there's no better time to enjoy it than at lunchtime.
Working from home generally means missing out on sharing sandwiches, trading news and making plans with your friends at a coffee station. However, working alone makes it even more critical that lunch becomes a bit of an occasion.
Getting there might take a bit of preparation and effort, but the rewards make it worthwhile. If you need some prompts to get started, this list should help.
Pretty soon you'll be making every work from home lunchtime into something extra special.
Plan and Prepare
You don't have to write out strict menus unless that's what you prefer doing. However, at least make sure there's a decent amount of food you like to eat in the fridge, freezer, and store cupboard.
Pretty much everything you eat will be based on timings and taste.
Advanced preparation can be your secret weapon if you have very little free time for lunch. You could batch cook and freeze one-pot meals like chilli, curry, or stew. Or invest in a slow cooker. Soups can be heated early on and left in a flask, and a sandwich will sit happily in the fridge for a morning.
If you have a more flexible schedule, you may enjoy cooking lunch fresh, and if you have the resources, your lunch can be top-notch, or as plain as possible. It doesn't matter.
Be Creative and Daring
Taking chances and pushing boundaries stimulate the brain and add richness to life. You can do this with your lunch. Create an exciting new dish from leftovers or order food you have never tried before to be delivered.
Stay in the Moment
Make lunch the meal that you concentrate on. Whether it's beans on toast or top-class caviar is not important. Eat from a nice plate, pour your juice into your fanciest glass, and taste everything.
Eat Away From Your Workspace
Eat in another room, your garden, on your balcony, or sit at the back door. However, if that's not possible, at least clear your desk, snooze your laptop, and, if reasonable, ignore work-related calls.
Add a Little Celebrity Style to Your Desk
When stars are booked for a film or TV show, they send a list of things they want to be provided in their dressing room. No doubt some of the requests are ridiculous or plain bizarre. You can make your lunch special by arranging a decadent snack tray to pick at, for dessert or throughout the afternoon.
Take a Few Minutes to Connect to Someone
Working alone at home has many plus points, but it can be quite a lonely experience. Why not plan an online lunch meet with a friend if you crave company? These days, chatting on video calls is familiar to most people. If time is on your side, you could even arrange to meet and eat in a cafe or restaurant now and then.
Enjoy Feeling Smug
While it's fair to say lunch breaks for home-based employees can have some challenges, there are plenty of things to be thankful for. You have coffee on tap from a kettle nobody steals the boiled water from! You can put food in the fridge in the morning and be confident it won't have wandered off alone when you return.
Plus, the fridge is clean, and so is the microwave. And the coffee cups.
All this and more is precisely why you need to celebrate lunch. It's the most vital, mind, body, and soul-feeding meal of the entire day. Working from home may mean doing things a little differently, but it doesn't take anything away from the many benefits.
