Can You Give Me Some Easy Lunch Ideas?

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Can you give me some easy lunch ideas? This is JJ Virgin, four time New.

York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert.

And Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you.

Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.

Antoinette D. Felipe from Facebook asks, can you provide easy lunch ideas?

Sometimes I don't have time so I.

Just make another shake. I got a bunch of great lunch ideas. I call it kind of my Lazy.

My lazy lunches and I will be right back to share them. Hey, it's JJ here. Now let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting gifts, surprise holiday school things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean on your laptop or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend, and honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover. You'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time, and that level of clarity could change everything, right? Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code Virgin.

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Lunch shouldn't be an afterthought. Like, if you really think about it, breakfast and lunch should be the super important meals, not dinner. So here's the thing we generally seem to like in my world. We make a shake for breakfast and I use either my bone broth protein shake or my plant based protein shake. Sometimes I mix the two together, go real wild with some healthy fats. Nut milk, little bit of greens, little berries, easy peasy. And oftentimes I will tell you I do that for lunch too. Cause it's easy. The important thing here is each of your meals should follow the virgin diet and sugar impact diet plate. That means clean protein, healthy fats and fiber from loads of non starchy veggies and slow low carbs. Why? Because when you eat, you set yourself up for the next meal. It's called the second meal phenomena. And so if you ever notice this, you know what I'm talking about here. You eat a crappy breakfast. Come on, this happened to all of us. You thought, I'll just have a muffin. Reality is that muffin, look at the wrapper. It is a cupcake, my friend. So you have that with the skinny latte thinking, okay, I think I'm doing at least something right. Wrong. All of a sudden, a couple hours later, your blood sugar is hijacked and you're hungry again. That is the second meal phenomenon. What you eat at breakfast or lunch is gonna set you up for the next one. So it's really important to get all of these right and especially don't blow it at breakfast or lunch. So here's the deal. Think. Trying to think of a pithy way to say this, but when I'm making something, I'm always looking at how can I save time, right? So if I'm going to make a bunch of chicken for dinner, I'm gonna make extra so that I can have it for lunch the next day. Ditto if I'm making vegetables or slow low carbs. I look at how can I incorporate this into other meals throughout the week. And so there's a couple things that I like to do for lunch. Number one, if I'm super in a rush or completely uninspired, I will do another protein shake. So that's always the option. But the easy things to do are keep some salad greens around. I like to have butter, lettuce and romaine. Those are my faves. Maybe a little arugula I always have some salad greens around so I can always take the protein from the night before. And that's one of my big hacks. The lunch hack is to make extra protein. So if you're making salmon or you're making grass fed beef, or you're making some pastured pork or chicken, make extra so you can put it into your salad. Because the easiest things for a salad is throw in some greens and some extra non starchy vegetables.

Extra.

Add some of your clean protein and then add in a little bit of a healthy fat. Now that could be some nut cheese, it could be some sunflower seeds, it could be some walnuts, could be some avocado. Super easy. And then finish it off with a little vinegar and olive oil. Easy peasy. Next up is to make a soup out of this stuff. Now you've got leftover protein, you've got leftover vegetables, you've got bone broth, you got soup. And this is so easy. You know, when you look at it, all you need to do is take out that slow cooker, crock pot, take it out. So good to have. Especially now that, well, depends on when you're listening to this. Maybe your weather's colder. So if that's the case, this is a great thing because now you've got lunch for a couple days and it's just the easiest leftover soup is just take out some bone broth. I like the flavor Chef bone broth. And then add in your leftover protein. You, you can add in whatever you like for your slow, low carbs. If I'm making wild rice one night, I make extra so I can throw it into something like this the next day. Throw in your vegetables and you are good to go. That is so simple. All right, there you go. Now here's another one. Just make double of what you're making for dinner and have it for lunch. So if you made. In our sample dinners every night, we make some kind of clean protein. And again we kind of rotate between a grass fed steak, a grass fed burger, pastured pork, lamb chops, chicken, wild salmon, wild halibut. That's our rotation. Pretty basic. Then we make some kind of slow, low carb. This could be little potatoes, could be a sweet potato, it could be wild rice, could be a squash, could be quinoa, lentils, beans. Then we do a lot of non starchy vegetables. And I have a freezer full of broccoli rice and cauliflower rice. So I can always load up there should I be out of fresh. So if you're doing that. Here's the easy peasy make double. Then you can have it again for breakfast the next day. There you go. And then finally the final one are wraps. So you just, you could either double up your meal from last night or keep some wraps on hand. So there's so many different ones out there now. I can't remember the brand name, but the cauliflower wrap I'm totally digging. Then there's Rudy's spinach ones. My husband loves those. And of course siete ones. So find the wraps you like. This is another easy one. All you need to do, take a wrap, could take a little avocado, spread it on in there, add some veggies, add your protein, wrap it up. Away we go. There a ton of easy lunch ideas that don't really take any time because you already did the work the night before. So think when you're preparing things. How do I make something that I can use a couple more times to make my life easy? There you go.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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