It's meal planning day! Today I ask the kids what
they want to eat, find recipes that work with their ideas and my schedule, and build out my week.
Right now I'm eating on the PiYo Nutrition Plan. It's pretty simple for me to wrap my head around, and there are SO many resources out there if you know how to look. The resource that really helped me was on the site
Weigh to Maintain. She takes you step-by-step through the Nutrition Guide to tell you exactly how to make the plan work for you.
Step 1: Calculate Your Calorie Target for Weight Loss
Step 2: Pick the Food Plan that Matches Your Calorie Target
Step 3: Choose the Foods YOU Want to Eat From the Food Lists
She even provides free printable food lists and meal planners. I don't use her meal planner, but I definitely use her food list, every week.
So back to my meal planning. I fall under Plan B according to all of my (simple) math.
I take the food list, I pick and choose. Some of the planning is easy. I start with that part first; breakfasts for the entire week, my weekend morning snack, and my weekday afternoon snacks. See the image below to the right. I choose these by default because I LOVE them.
 |
| The start of my meal plan. |
I also take a look at my PiYo workout schedule provided in my Challenge Pack materials and mark my exercises down for the week. This keeps me from bringing my booklet out every time I need to remember what I'm doing that day.
It's more than you think; I'm forgetful!
Okay, so 6 of seven days of the week I have a secondary veggie/grain, two fruits, two proteins, and a healthy fat. I cross those bits off of my list.
Next I pick three different meals that I can trade between lunches and dinners. Mommy confession:
I only stress about cooking one meal that we'll all share for the week. We
do sit down for dinner together. We
do not always eat the same thing. The kids always end up with fruits and veggies because they eat the excess of my prep food, but they may have a peanut butter sandwich, chicken nuggets, ravioli... you get the point. It works for us, and that's what matters.
This week, Rachel asked me to make taco salads. That sounds easy enough! So that will be lean turkey seasoned with
this awesome spice mixture, which according to my food list is 'free food' as long as I leave out the salt. I'll throw in tomatoes, lettuce, onion, and maybe a little cheese for taste. Yum! I'll skip the tortillas and let the kids have some chips with it. The breakdown:
Lean Turkey (3 oz) - 1 Protein
Spices - FREE!
Cherry Tomatoes & Onions - 1 Primary Veggie
Spinach - 1 Primary Veggie
We'll make that dinner one day and lunch on another. Awesome. Mental note, that means around 12 oz of lean turkey that I'll need to pick up, among the veggies.
Sunday night, when we prep, we usually cook a bunch of food. Since I
prefer my grilled chicken fresh, we'll have that for dinner that night. Broccoli and brown rice can make great sides. I'll use some left over chicken to make my favorite buffalo chicken wraps, which I eat on corn tortillas (don't judge me, I love them) and with carrot sticks.
It goes on like this, until I end up with my grocery list and a meal plan:
Repetitive doesn't bother me, but you can switch it up. If I want a bit of a different taste, I might swap my berries around. I like to add frozen spinach to my Shakeo when the mood strikes me. If the sweet tooth strikes, I add a small amount of dark chocolate morsels and coconut to my peanuts. I also tend to run most days of the week, so I have a bit of calorie deficit to make up for. This meal plan will probably get a bit of a run over when the kids hit bed, and I may add one more meal to break it up a bit, but this is just a little insight into my process.
