Walking the Wall

I’ve been interested in Bento lunch packing for a year or so just, to be honest, because of all the neat little accessories. Then the other day I stumbled on a couple great sites when I was researching balanced lunches. I had decided this week that I was going to pack up all our lunches the night before even though other than my husband, we all stay home. Staying home, though, is a deceptive phrase because we acutally run around a lot to family, friends, park, zoo, etc. Which means we tend to grab fast food much more than we should, or skip lunch, or just snag a pop tart or something on the run. All of the above is unhealthy and needs to stop. So, a little searching and I end up being sucked into hours of LunchinaBox.com. Who knew looking at preschool bento boxes would be so interesting! She has a great guide to how bento size works and how they correlate to calories. I’ve only just scratched the surface of JustBento, which has a lot of information about using the compact lunch qualities of Bento making as well as the balanced meal concepts it enforces for loosing weight and learning portion control–another thing most people, and certainly my family (other than my son), needs to relearn. She also has a great post about why someone like me, who works at home during the week, should still make a bento lunch.

Not having any large Asian stores around locally, I just bought four Fit & Fresh lunch to go boxes that have coldpack inserts. This is large, comparitively, for use as a bento box, but good for sandwiches in the bottom portion. I’d like to get a few traditional sized bento boxes but am doing some research and finding out what I want first. For my first packing, despite the size of the box, I was only at about 550 calories. Now, this is by no means a balanced meal as the protein is about missing entirely from this, I’ll add a hard boiled egg for that which puts the whole lunch at 625 calories, close to my 600 calorie goal–but not very good in terms of carbs and processed foods. Next stop, shooting for the balanced aspect of packing a bento lunch.

[ETA: Definitely too much food, ate 1/2 the sandwich and 3/4 of the pasta, same with the kids, we def. got a lesson in how little portions of a variety of food "feels" more filling.]