~Failing to plan is planning to fail~
The most successful way to succeed at changing your nutrition lifestyle is to have a plan! Meal planning can be overwhelming *see picture above*, but once you get the hang of it, it's rewarding and becomes easy. It can even get to be a little fun when you start incorporating new meals you've never tried before.
For starters though, let's take it one step at a time:
- Know your calorie bracket! This is a very important part of meal planning. If you don't know HOW MUCH you should eat, then you can't start picking out your menu. Portion Fix & the Fixate Cookbook are great resources to help you dial in your nutrition!
- I personally like to count colors instead of calories using the above tools!
- Calorie Brackets can range from 1200-1499 to 2500-2800.
- Take a look at the bottom of this log for a sample of how to calculate your calories/colors needed!
- Keep in mind the food you already eat! Love burgers and fries? Go for some Lean Turkey meat for your burger with Fixate Ketchup, tomato and onion on a Romaine Lettuce "bun." Go old school and cut up some sweet potatoes and bake homemade fries! There are clean recipes all over Pinterest for you favorite foods. The resources are endless.
- Plug in meals to your menu! Once you have a handful of meals you're ready to plug into your menu, it's time to plan out your week. I like to go day by day, with repeating days!
- Here's and example of my upcoming week. Day 1 & 2 will be repeated throughout the week (M-F and 1 weekend day), with Day 3 to be used on a weekend day for various weeks.
- When you are first starting out, planning like this can be helpful since there's not a whole 7 days that need different meals. Left overs won't go to waste!
- Watch the serving sizes! I'm notorious for making an amazing dish that ends up feeding a small Army... when I'm only cooking for 1 - in my head! Also, if you mess up the servings size and end up eating 2 servings, it will count against your calories/colors twice!
- GO SHOPPING! Once your menu is plugged in, write out your shopping list, and go shopping. It's best to shop maybe 2 or 3 times a week, especially if you are getting a lot of produce products.
- If you have Beachbody on Demand, check out the Fixate cooking show. Not only is there a demonstration on how to cook the meal, but there's a downloadable recipe & shopping list!
- Meal Prep! Now that we've meal planned it's time to meal prep! Take the pieces of your meals that you can cook/bake/prepare in advance and get this done in 1 day! For example: Tomato sauce can be made in large batches and stored, even frozen!
Remember, meal planning take time to master. But mastering it is TOTALLY doable! If you need more resources to make the journey easier, check out my Pinterest Board just for meal planning! You can always head over to my Facebook Page and send me a quick message with any questions you may have - if I don't know the answer, I can sure help you find it 😊
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