The Beauty of Meal Planning

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it before. Plan your meals, blah blah blah. Right? Wrong! Well, maybe you HAVE heard it before but Laura wants you to hear it again because she believes it is THAT important. Listen to find out 3 ways that meal planning can help you during your week, as well as an easy way to make it happen.

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Transcript

You’re listening to the Love and Lettuce podcast with Laura Lima, Episode 37. Today I want to talk to you about the beauty of food planning, or meal planning, and why I feel that this is such an important part of your week, and just what it can do for you for the rest of the week. And I also want to give you some tips on how to get started. It’s simpler than you think.

Hey, this is Laura Lima, holistic nutritionist and founder of New mama nation, and host of the love and lettuce podcast. I am here to help mamas know what to eat to give them energy and help them feel fantastic. So they can better enjoy life with their littles. And remember, this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only, and does not replace medical advice from your healthcare provider, and is not intended to diagnose or treat any medical condition. As always, please consult your healthcare provider to find out what is right for you. With that said, let’s get to the show.

Is weight loss a goal that you have, but you feel like you’ve tried all the things and nothing sticks?

Well, I want to give you some advice. Specifically, I want to give you the five common weight loss mistakes that I see so often. And I want to break them down for you. So go to http://bit.ly/5wlmistakes and get my free download there.

Let’s talk about what meal planning is.

So as I call it beautiful, why it is so helpful for us? Well, number one, it gives us more freedom throughout the week to focus on other stuff because we’re not always thinking about dinner in the back of our mind. Because think about it. When we don’t know what’s for dinner. Let’s say it’s Monday, you don’t know what you’re gonna make for dinner tonight. You’re going through your day. And as three o’clock, four o’clock creeps up on you. If you don’t know yet what you’re making for dinner, how do you feel? I know how I feel. I’m like, Ooh, it starts to get a little bit stressful. I start to feel a little bit of overwhelm.

I’m like, Oh, I’m so busy. But now I have to go to the freezer. And I have to decide what I’m going to be eating and Oh, shoot. If I don’t have any thought-out meat in the fridge, like fresh meat in the fridge, then I’m going to have to Yeah, take it from the freezer. And then, you know, thought out quickly is like, ah, if I had just thought about this in advance, I could have taken it out of the fridge or out of the freezer last night or this morning. But no, now I’m all last minute. What am I going to be choosing?

When I’m just doing things last minute, I’m likely not going to be choosing the healthiest option. Because it takes too long, even though it really shouldn’t. But in my mind and like No, it’s too much. I just need something convenient and fast. That is not the way to plan your meal for the night because that’s not necessarily going to give you the healthiest option. It’s not going to give you that energy that we’re looking for. Truly looking for from our food.

Planning Meals = Freedom

So planning our meals at the beginning of the week, would have given me so much more freedom. For example, on this Monday, two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock is coming. What am I going to make for dinner is already decided so I don’t always have this. What am I making for dinner tonight at the back of my mind, I just know already.

Planning Meals = Saving Time

The second thing is that it is kind of a similar, a similar thing. It saves you time. Because if you take 10 minutes at the beginning of your week, let’s say on Sunday before your week starts on Monday. If you take 10 minutes on your Sunday, you will save yourself 10 plus minutes every single day. Yeah, if you take only 10 minutes, once a week, you will save yourself at least 10 minutes every single day.

So because I suggest planning your meals from Monday through Friday, and specifically I plan I plan my dinners. I don’t plan every single meal usually. But if you plan your dinners on Sunday, that will save you approximately 55 minutes throughout the week. Because it’s something that I don’t even have to think about. I don’t even have to take time for. I just know what I’m making and I can go and start making it. So during Maggie’s nap on a Tuesday, I’ll look at my food plan and say, Okay, I’m having chicken breasts tonight with Greek salad and grilled zucchini. Awesome. So let me just get that started. I know exactly what to do and what steps to take. I don’t have to go through that first step of deciding what the heck I’m going to make in the first place.

If you’re really honest with yourself, you will know how much time it takes, it takes so much time to figure out what you’re going to make. Get it out of the fridge and freezer, and start to assemble it. And it takes so much of your brain space, so much of your brain bandwidth, which otherwise should be going to other things, you shouldn’t have to spend so much time on figuring out dinner. But we do this to ourselves. So if you start on Sunday, and you take 10 minutes and plan what you will have, you will be golden.

Leftovers

Now I do plan for leftovers as a side note, so you don’t have to have five meals that you’re cooking every week. No, no, no, no, you can cook maybe three meals. And two of those days have leftovers. Either you’re using part of the chicken that you just made last night into something else. Or you’re literally having the chicken breast with the grilled zucchini leftover the next day. So you can change it up or have the exact same way, that’s fine. But leftovers are also I would say essential to have a nice, easy week.

Meal Planning = Healthy Choices

The third reason that I believe meal planning is so awesome, is that we choose our healthiest when we’re in our right mind, so to speak. When we’re planning in advance, we’re most likely to choose the healthiest option when we’re choosing in advance. Because if we wait till that Monday at three o’clock, it’s like Oh, the frozen pizzas going in the oven, right? But if we had chosen in advance, we probably listen, frozen pizza, there’s nothing all bad with that, sometimes we’re going to have that. And I think that we should plan for that. And we should enjoy it. But if we didn’t actually want to have that frozen pizza, if we would rather have had something healthy, then we have the ability to choose that in advance.

On Sunday, when we are prepping for the week, we’re way more likely to say you know what, I think on Monday, this is what we should have. And on Tuesday, we should have the salmon. Wednesday, we should have the steak. And again, leftovers in between. I just kind of said that as three different options. So we’re way more likely to choose the foods that are going to actually nourish our bodies and give us the energy that we need from our food if we’re planning them in advance.

So how do we do this?

How can we properly implement meal planning? Number one, we take a pen and paper or get it on your phone. If you’d rather do it on there, that’s totally fine. But I like good old paper and pen when it comes to my meal plan. So I can actually look at it. I can cross things out, I can do arrows, whatever. I write down Monday to Friday, and I decide what we’re going to have. And I usually do this with Miguel, my husband, because he loves to cook dinner as well. He loves to know what we’re having. Actually he’s more spontaneous, but he does love to be a part of the planning process.

So we decide, okay, first of all, what is in our fridge and what is in our freezer that we want to use? Because we don’t want to always have to go and buy something for the entire week. We want to use what we already have. So we check our freezer. What kind of meat do we have? Do we have ground beef? Okay, so let’s do some spaghetti with meat sauce on Tuesday. Awesome. Should we have a Caesar salad with that? Great. Let’s add that as well.

What else do we have in the freezer? We have some pork chops. Okay, pork chops are going to go on Thursday. What do you want to have with the pork chops? The vegetables for the week? I would say green beans or asparagus. And should we do a salad that day? No. You know what, we’ll just do the asparagus and pork chops. That’s fine.

So you see we just go day by day. We decide what we want to have. And then we want to incorporate the leftovers as well. So yeah, on Friday, I think we’ll have the leftovers from Thursday. So Friday will be a non cook day. Or maybe we skip a day and have the leftovers the next day. So on Monday, we made the chicken breast on Wednesday. We have the leftovers there. So on Monday and Tuesday, we’re cooking Wednesday’s leftover day, Thursday, cooking Friday, leftover day.

So we just write it down and after the dinners are planned I say okay, what do we have to buy this week? What is our grocery list going to look like based on exactly what we have to buy for each day, then we make the grocery list. And then we go shopping. My ideal is that we only have to go shopping once a week, we actually like going to the store and roaming the aisles. And it’s kind of a fun thing for us to do. But I don’t want to have to do that.

I would so much rather have the list and have the stuff already in the house. So I know every single day of meals, of dinners, we already have the stuff for. And yeah, if we want to go extra to the store, great. But we don’t have to. And that’s a key for me.

Meal Planning = Time for Other Things

So we’ve written our list of dinners for the week, we’ve written our shopping list, and we’ve gone shopping. And finally, now we get to enjoy the true beauty of meal planning, which is going through our week able to focus on and have time for the other stuff. Everything else in life, while truly nourishing our bodies with foods that will give us energy and increase our vitality. Yes, please, that is exactly what I want! And that is what I can accomplish with meal planning.

So I want to ask you, are you using a meal plan?

Do you decide in advance what you’re going to have for dinner? Because if you don’t, I highly suggest you give it a try and see how it goes. You have nothing to lose. Only everything to gain. Sanity, less overwhelmed, less stress, more time, more freedom during the week. Doesn’t that sound amazing? And it can literally be that easy. Plan your five dinners Monday to Friday, and just know they can be flexible. So if you decide, you know, I don’t actually want to have spaghetti tonight. I would rather have the salmon. Fine. That’s totally fine. If you want to do that you can. The idea is that if you didn’t have that I’d rather have salmon. You know what you’re having for dinner.

So if you have any special urges for something specific, like a different meal, which ideally is healthy. Yes, you can do that you can satisfy that urge for the salmon. But the idea was that if you didn’t even have that thought of salmon. You already know what you’re eating for dinner. There’s no guessing, you’ve taken the guessing away.

So I want you to try that in your life. I want you to let me know how it goes. Come visit my Instagram profile @LauraAnnLima and send me a DM I would love to hear from you. Or you can comment on this podcast post. Whatever. I want to know how you’re incorporating it into your life. Maybe you already do it and I want to have tips from you if you do. But yeah, I want to hear how it goes. So talk to me there and I will talk to you next week.

Have an amazing week mama. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Love and Lettuce podcast. To find out how to work with me and for more great info check out newmamanation.com. This is Laura. Until next time, love and lettuce.