Transcript: How To Meal Plan And Create Time Freedom
INTRO: Welcome to Healthy Sexy Nutrition with me, Michelle Fox, culinary nutritionist health coach, and your host for this podcast. I teach busy professionals how to get more nutrition in their bodies and how to have more fun in their home kitchens. If you struggle with consistency or sometimes forget to make your needs a priority, or you avoid planning your meals, you, my friend, are in the right place.
Join me each week for inspiration to increase your energy, discover new recipes, manage your hormonal woes and so much more. You are a busy professional, but that does not mean your nutrition should suffer. You deserve to live in a body and have a life that you love. Let’s dig in. 📍
MICHELLE: Well, hello. Guess what we're talking about today. It is a meal planning. One of my favorite things to talk about and to teach on. I will tell you upfront that meal planning not only saves you money, but it saves time in the long run. And before I lose you, please stay with me. And just keep an open mind.
Because, I will also share with you that this meal planning has revolutionized our world here in my household. I will tell you I have had a meal plan put together and always on our family wall for probably, I would say about the last five years. And so, what that has done it has eliminated the, “oh, what's for dinner mom question,” which just feels like nails on a chalkboard to me. So we don't have that anymore because my people, my humans, my family, they have been trained to know that if you want to know what's for dinner tonight, then you just look at the meal plan that’s on our wall. It's right near the kitchen. They can walk in and it's there.
So I give you that little tip to have that written out so that if you to share your home with other humans, it helps lessen some of the arguments and, or the frustrations about truly what's for dinner. As far as the mechanics, we're going to walk through that next.
So if you are in a place where you can pause this recording, I want you to head over to michellefox.com/planner. And there, you can download your free—Yes, I promise it is absolutely free—meal planner. And what it is—It's a blank meal template that I'm going to walk through now, and it might be helpful if you are looking at it as well. So I'm going to give you a two second pause on this podcast to go grab it.
Okay. So my friends who are already like “I have got this. I already have your planner. I've been doing this for a while.” Well, awesome. You're in the right place. And for my friends who are like, “ah, I don't know about this meal planning thing.” Yes, you are in the right place as well.
So looking at this meal planner, I will tell you at the top I have for the week of, so I do this every week. I actually calendar 30 minutes a week. And again, stay with me. If you just rolled your eyes. “Well, Michelle, I don't have half an hour.” Well, I promise my half an hour upfront has saved me to even four hours throughout the week. So this 30 minutes ahead of time, please get it on your calendar now.
I know when I was working an eight to five job in corporate, I would calendar 30 minutes every Sunday. Now that I have a little bit more flexibility over my schedule, I calendar 30 minutes every Wednesday morning. After I do the meal plan, then I go and shop for the groceries on Wednesday. And then I come home and prep all my veggies.
So yes, we will definitely be talking a lot about veggie prepping on this podcast, but not today. Today, we're going to focus on this hardcore beautiful document that I cannot stress enough, is going to save us time—It's going to save us money. Okay, so let's dig in.
So at the top, it has for the week of, so I put the date. And then on the left, I have all the days; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, all the way through Sunday. And that is where I start the very first column, because I like to keep it realistic so that there aren't any—well, I was going to say there aren't any stressful days—but you know, we're still human and things do come up. But how about this? I will say, I like to look at the calendar first to have less stressful days and less stressful encounters when it comes to our meals. And so I will look at my actual calendar on my phone. So I'll start with Monday, cause that's the first day here on the planner. And I'll look and I'll see “Oh, does my daughter have, you know, a tutoring session this evening? Does she have a theater activity? Am I meeting with a friend?”
So I put anything that might be quote, unquote, extra curricular on the calendar, just so that I know how to plan ahead for that. Because if it is going to be an evening where—it's not just, you know, we're coming home from work, digging into dinner—then I'm going to plan for either like a Crock-Pot meal or maybe the night before I'll double up and I'll cook two meals. Just so I'm not stressed the night of extra activities.
With that said, just kind of a side note. I will say I do actually often cook larger meals so that we do have leftovers. And I feel like I'm jumping ahead of myself, because lunchtime is typically when I'm going to have the leftover meal from dinner before. And that way I'm ensuring that I'm getting absolutely amazing nutrition in my body. Because I'm not rushing. It's the good nutrition from the night before. And body is happy.
So back to the planner and the calendar, it's like go through day by day by day by day by day. Just do that seven days. Seven times.
And next, I will look at it. So breakfast is the next column over. I don't mind sharing with you now that we're friends—most of my breakfasts, typically are smoothies. And they're typically not ingested until after 10:30 or 11, because I do practice intermittent fasting. Which helps to manage my weight and also helps to balance my energy.
So.Spoiler alert. That is probably going to be an upcoming episode soon, because I know there can be a lot of confusion about intermittent fasting. There is research that is for and against. I will just share, for my body, it works. So yes, I promise. I will share more. And if you actually are curious, send me a DM and let me know that you want this episode moved up sooner than later. And I'm more than happy to share the research and my experience with intermittent fasting.
Okay. So breakfast, it's typically going to be a smoothie. So I'll write that down. Next over, I already spilled the beans. Huh. Get it? Spilled the beans. That on my lunch, it's almost a hundred percent going to be leftovers from the night before. If for some reason we don't have leftovers, then I'll usually just make a larger smoothie and, or build a salad because we always have grains either in the fridge or out in the garden. And I like to layer it and put lots of different veggies on and maybe put on some leftover keenwah or brown rice to, you know, bulk up and have some healthy carbs in there.
So that's going to be my lunch. So I often—it's not really cheating, but I often leave breakfast and lunch open on my actual planner because it really is already planned out for the most part. So those are blank.
But now, dinner. That is the biggest column right there, especially again, from my friends who are sharing their home with other human beings. It's really nice to know what you are planning for and know that everybody is on the same page.
Side note. And then I promise, I'll try not to do too many more side notes. But. Side note, when you do have this planner and everybody can see it. It's really important I find to bring people in. So if you have children ask them, you know, perhaps “Wednesday night little person, you're planning dinner” for that night and or “Hey partner, Tuesday please plan dinner.” And then that way again, everybody's on the same page.
So. Dinner comes this column. I'm also looking at my very far left column with the dates to make sure I need to plan—or to see if I need to plan ahead for extracurricular activities. And extracurricular—or extra time that may be happening that evening.
And so I'm looking at my meal planner from last week and I see that one of the days, Steve, my husband, had to work late. And I also had to take Angel's hair down. It was on a Wednesday. And so that night I already knew we were just gonna go out to dinner. So that's another thing. Be realistic. Be as realistic as possible so that you don't have any food waste. And that you do feel more confident walking into your week.
And so I knew that was going to be out. We ended up going to Chipotle. They have, you know, amazing organic food. This is not necessarily a plug. I'm definitely not getting endorsed, but that is one of our quote unquote cheat spots where, you know, If it's not looking realistic for me to cook. To put ways a great thing to lean on. Once in awhile, I would say probably two to three times a month. That is where we grab our dinner.
So then next, as I'm honing in on some of the days that might be a little heavy as far as my time commitments, then that's when I dig into my recipes. So I have a big binder where I have some printed out recipes of some of my faves. I also love to use Dr. Google and just Google some new fresh recipes. I find it really fun to find maybe some traditional recipes and then put my culinary nutrition spin on them.
Which means I'm going to be making them dairy-free, gluten-free and of course sugar-free. So that I can keep the deliciousness, but I don't have any of the inflammatory ingredients in these meals. And so. Go through. Put those items on my dinner list. And then the very last column, my friends—Yes, we are almost there. We're almost done and ready to go do our grocery shopping—is the shopping list.
So I look at everything in the columns. And I go through each recipe, and then I make sure to put it on the shopping list. Of course, I'm going to check my pantry, check my fridge and check my freezer to make sure I don't already have these ingredients so that I'm not doubling up.
It's kind of funny. I was sharing with a friend the other day, that I feel like my kitchen is kind of like the skeleton crew. Because I truly only buy the foods that we are planning to eat.
I almost forgot snacks. So back to me saying let's be realistic.
Don't forget about the snacks. Because you might say “yes, this is the week I'm eating clean. I'm doing it. Michelle Fox, culinary nutritionist, has told me to eat this way.” Yes, you can do that. But if you're going to use my name, then let's just remember that I am telling you to stay realistic. So if you are a snacker, let's get some of those healthy snacks in the basket so that you're not tempted to go to the convenience store. Or if you're in an office, you know, one of those machines where you're putting dollar bills in. Let's stay away from that. So feel free to head to my blog at michellefox.com. You'll see plenty of resources for a sugar-free and dairy-free and gluten-free snacks there. One snack just popped in my head. I'm a little hungry right now, don't mind admitting to you.
I'm thinking of a brown rice cake with some yummy almond butter on top. That's one of our family faves. So just be mindful of that. And plan, plan, plan ahead.
All right. Well, I believethat is it. Again, go to michellefox.com/planner to get your planner template that you can print. In fact, I typically print about 10 ahead of time to, so it's an easy thing to grab each week.
And to recap, I grabbed my planner. I then look at my calendar to see if there's any extra activities happening. I then fill in all the columns. Specifically, the dinner column. I then go and look for recipes to fill up this dinner column, whether it's former recipes or traditional recipes that I typically make or new recipes that I want to play with and experiment with. And then I go over to the far right corner to my shopping list and I make sure I have all of the ingredients to set myself up for success for the week.
So I truly hope that was helpful. If you got anything from this podcast episode, I would say and hope, that it is just to plan. You don't have to use my planner, but just have a plan so that you are saving money. And you are not wasting food, because nobody feels good about that. It just, it doesn't feel good to throw away food. I don't care who you are, what status you have. Like nobody likes throwing away food. So this is an excellent way to take care of your body and also take care of the earth.
I truly hope that was helpful. Come back. I've got a really juicy episode coming in next Tuesday. And I hope you'll join us.
Thanks so much for listening to Healthy Sexy Nutrition.
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Keep showing up for yourself and know that you and your health matter, you deserve to live in a body and have a life that you love.
