Last month, we went to an intense 3-day workshop in Atlanta that we knew would have long hours. We were also trying to continue eating reasonably healthy and trying to save money at the same time. So what did we do you ask?

Breakfast

Well, before we left home we were drinking green smoothies every morning for breakfast anyway, so I just made a few extra batches of smoothies and put each serving into a quart-sized zip-top freezer bag and put them into the freezer flat to freeze with the name of the smoothie and calories on the label. These did a dual purpose because they also acted as ice packs in the cooler on our way to Atlanta. They were only partially thawed, so when we got to our room, I left the next day’s smoothie in the refrigerator and put the rest in the freezer. Each morning we added a straw and drank our smoothie then pulled the ones for the next day out so they could thaw. That is how we dealt with breakfast, and it worked out very well.

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Lunch

Lunch was not much harder. We use a lot of the Ole Xtreme Wellness High-Fiber Low-Carb Wraps in place of bread in our house, so we threw a pack of those in along with cheese sticks and sliced turkey lunchmeat for wraps. We tossed in the avocado we had in the refrig so we could use it up. We also prewashed and bagged baby carrots, cherries, and pretzels in individual servings. This meant each morning all we had to do to pack our lunches was make our sandwich/wrap and bag it, then grab the additional things we wanted to have to round out our lunch that day. We also had a small selection of Clif Bars and some prebagged Orchard Valley Harvest Snack Packs Trail Mix. We had a couple of single serving sized bottles that we could fill with our own water or iced tea each morning to add to our lunch bag. Everything fit nicely in my Thirty-One Lunch Break Thermal bag and was enough to feed both of us.

This particular event offered lunch tickets for $20 a person to go through a buffet and fill a styrofoam carryout container to bring back and eat in the meeting room. Nobody really wanted to drive somewhere to get fast food because once you were parked you didn’t want to have to give up your parking space for the day as they really had a shortage of parking at this particular event center. Needless to say, Hubby and I were thrilled that we had been cheap and planned to pack our lunches and thus avoided the additional $120 it would have cost us to eat that buffet lunch for the three days of the conference. I’m not going to even pretend we didn’t think of that as a huge win! Continue reading