I’m sure you’ve heard once or twice about meal prep or meal planning. Why is there so much talk about it, and does it really matter? I’m here to tell you that meal planning is definitely worth the hype! Not only will it save you money from constantly eating out, it also helps you stay on track with your diet and health/fitness goals.
Below I’m sharing with you some of the things that has helped me to stay relatively consistent with meal planning.
Tip #1 – Write it Down! No joke, you are more likely to remember and feel accountable if you write down your meals. You can have a traditional food journal or a piece of paper and a pen. I started using a dry erase calendar, which I strategically placed by my bathroom mirror as you can see from my picture above (LOL). I write down my meals for the week on Sunday night, and every night, I checked off what I ate, or didn’t eat, and evaluate how I did for the day. I allow myself one or two days of eating anything I want in small portions (typically on Saturday/Sunday). Here’s a free downloadable meal planner you can print and use.
Tip #2 – Make It! I meal prep on Sundays and during the week, depending on how I feel. I eat pretty much the same foods most times (lots of protein, beans, cauliflower rice and spinach, sweet potato and plantains, nuts, yoghurt, smoothies, and salads). I have these containers from Amazon that help me with portion control so that I don’t have to weigh/measure everything. With time, I have also become good at eyeballing my portions. I just have estimated calories of what each meal consists of, and try to burn 500 to 1000 calories during each workouts to ensure I have a caloric deficit (more on that below).
Tip #3 – Track it! My Fitness Pal app is a great app for tracking the calories in every meal, and there are countless other apps that do the same thing. It’s not enough to write down what you plan to eat for the week. You also need to know the calories and macros in each meal to ensure that you have a caloric deficit. This simply means that your body should have burned more calories/energy than the calories you consumed in order to lose weight (if that is your goal, which is my goal LOL). My dry erase calendar not only serves as my food planner, it also serves as my tracker that I see all the time rather than having to open an app in my phone to log my food.
That’s it folks! Using these three tips should get you set up for success in your health/fitness journey. CONSISTENCY IS KEY! If you stick to these three tips for a month, you’ll begin to see changes in your relationship with food and your waist line. Please share any other tips you have, and let me know if you’d like me to do a detailed post about counting macros, foods to avoid, or anything else. Thanks for stopping by!
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