It is curious that some of the best planners neglect to plan their meals. Even people who use their planning skills successfully and habitually at work and in their personal lives often fail to plan what or when they will eat. I suppose it’s because food is so readily available that it seems unnecessary to plan. Also, many people think that healthful eating is more about willpower than anything else. I assure you that willpower has very little to do with healthful eating and that planning has quite a lot to do with it. As we’ve already discussed, willpower is little more than magical thinking, and the myth of willpower is the undoing of many good intentions.
Every time you eat or drink is an opportunity. What you eat in the short term affects your energy level, feelings of comfort or discomfort, and perhaps your mood and ability to do work. What you eat over time affects your long-term well-being, including your risks of developing type 2 diabetes, dementia, and other chronic health problems. Something this important deserves some planning.
Common Barriers to Meal Planning
The most common barrier I’ve seen is lack of awareness of the importance of meal planning. Planning your meals can lead to better nutrition and better health, greater control over your food choices, more food variety, saving money, less waste, and much less stress. But people have many good reasons not to plan. Fortunately, most obstacles have solutions.
• It takes time. Yes, it does take time upfront, but it’s worth it. And in the long term, it will probably save time. Once you have experience with meal planning, you can re-use older menu plans.
• It’s hard to please everyone. It’s helpful to give everyone a say in the menu. Family members can take turns picking entrees and sides. If you have picky diners, pair less favorable foods with favorite foods, so everyone has something to eat and like. And remember not to pressure anyone to eat foods they don’t like. Food acceptance increases with exposure, not pressure.
• Family members have conflicting schedules. With my kids involved in after-school sports and jobs, this happened to my family quite a lot. It helped to factor schedules into the plan. Some planned meals were nothing more than leftovers or soup and sandwiches. Or often I used my slow cooker, so I could serve dinner in that tiny window of opportunity. And sometimes that window was mighty tiny! What saved us from unhealthful eating was the plan. It’s okay to plan something as simple as a sandwich.
• There are too many surprises in your week. Have a backup meal plan. By stocking your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer smartly, you can always whip up something quickly. Scrambled eggs, frozen vegetables, and potatoes are delicious and far more wholesome than a bucket of greasy chicken.
• You don’t know what a healthful meal looks like. Review the section of healthful eating patterns in Chapter 3. Give a close look at the Plate Method of meal planning on page 52. And check out the menu ideas at the end of Chapter 6 on page 168.
• You don’t know what to cook. Start a collection of go-to recipes and meals. First include your family favorites. Then add more by searching the Internet. A few terrific websites are the American Diabetes Association’s My Food Advisor® (http://tracker.diabetes.org), Cooking Light (http://www.cookinglight.com), and EatingWell (http://www.eatingwell.com). Keep reading for more menu ideas.
Two Methods of Meal Planning
If you are new to meal planning, you may prefer a very detailed and structured method. If all you need is a little organization, try the mix-and-match method.
Detailed Meal Planning
1. Look ahead. This is the critical step that many people skip. Look at your calendar and, if applicable, talk to your family to learn about schedules and other obstacles to a planned dinner. Consider if you have a late appointment, sports activities for your kids, or some other activity that cuts into your meal preparation time. If you do, choose a meal that’s quick to make like sandwiches, tuna salad, or leftovers.
2. Put your plan on paper. Jot down full dinners that you plan to serve your family. Use a calendar or one of the templates in Appendix B. The Detailed Weekly Menu Planner template (page 274) has room for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Fill in each meal or just those with which you need extra help. The Plate Method dinner template guides you to plan a meat or vegetarian entrée, a starchy food, and one or more non-starchy vegetables. Many people like putting their planned meals on a dry-erase board that hangs in their kitchens. Whatever method you choose—paper, dry-erase, or electronic calendar—simply write in each food you plan to serve.
• Decide which dinner meals need to be quick-to-prepare foods or leftovers and which meals can be put together more leisurely.
• Using your family’s favorite meals, your recipe collection, and ideas for quick meals, start filling in the blanks. Don’t forget to plan for leftovers, either for another dinner or for lunches. It saves times to cook once to eat twice. For example, you might prepare salmon, quinoa, and roasted broccoli for dinner and serve salmon salad later in the week.
If you’re new to meal planning, make it easy on yourself and start with your favorite recipes and menu ideas. Continue this process with lunches and breakfasts or stick with dinner only. If you have lunches and breakfasts down pat, don’t waste your effort adding them to your meal plan. Or if the process is overwhelming, start with dinner and move to other meals when you feel more confident or energized.
3. Take inventory. Add any ingredients or staple items that you don’t have on hand to your grocery list.
4. Build flexibility into your plan. If an item is on special at the grocery store or if you simply have a desire to try something new, go for it. A plan is your guide, not a set of rules that you must follow. Make it work for you by remaining flexible.
5. Recycle your menus. Make everything as easy on yourself as possible. Without allowing yourself to get into a food rut, reuse what works. Keep your menus in a paper folder or on your computer. After you have 3 or 4 weeks of menus, take the best of each to create the next one.
Mix-and-Match Meal Planning
If too much structure gets you down or if you’re already practiced with meal planning, use this flexible method as your guide. I’ve been doing this for years. A Mix-and-Match Weekly Menu Planner template is in Appendix B on page 279.
1. Look ahead. Again, don’t ignore this critical step. Without knowing what might get in the way of putting a healthful meal on the table, you’re leaving yourself open to choosing meals that are too complicated for the time you have available and wasting food you’re not able to prepare.
2. Select entrees and side dishes. If your review of the week ahead tells you, for example, that you’ll need six dinners, choose six entrees, six nonstarchy vegetables, and six starchy foods. You don’t need to plan each meal in full, just be sure to have enough food planned for each category. That’s the mix-and-match part of this. Your starch category might include roasted potatoes, canned corn, quinoa, brown rice, and sweet potatoes. You can decide shortly before cooking which entrée and nonstarchy vegetable to match them with.
3. Take inventory. Identify which ingredients you have on hand, and add everything else to your grocery list. Don’t feel compelled to preselect each item, especially vegetables. As long as you know the proper number for each category, you can decide in the supermarket based on availability and affordability.
4. Fill in the rest of the meals. In a similar manner, decide how many lunches you’ll eat at home and how many you will pack. Select the required number of fruits, vegetables, sandwich meats, etc. Add the necessary items to your list. Do the same for the foods you will need for breakfasts and snacks.
Go-To Meals
You probably already have a handful of favorite meals to prepare when you have the luxury of time and other go-to meals for when time is tight. Putting them in print now will help you when you’re meal planning. It’s also helpful to have backup meal ideas when your original plan won’t work. So add some ideas for wholesome foods that you can prepare quickly or pick up when necessary. There are several suggestions below.
Planned Backup Meals
What would you prepare for dinner if the chicken you intended to cook was spoiled or if you returned home too late to cook it? And what would you eat for lunch at work if you accidently left your packed lunch at home? You can see that eating healthfully in these situations has less to do with willpower and discipline and more to do with skills, strategies, and plans. The following ideas can serve as inspiration.
At home:
• Scrambled eggs, ready-to-heat brown rice, frozen vegetable
• Tuna salad, whole-grain crackers, canned or fresh fruit
• Low-fat cottage cheese topped with fruit and nuts or diced tomatoes and basil; serve with toast or crackers
• Bean burrito made by mixing the following canned items together: drained kidney beans, drained tomatoes, fat-free refried beans, diced green chiles, and diced black olives; mix in reduced-fat shredded cheese and heat. Serve with whole-grain tortillas, nonfat Greek yogurt or sour cream, and jarred salsa. To keep the sodium in check, use no-salt-added varieties of canned products or mix no-salt-added varieties and regular varieties.
• Panini made with whole-grain bread, reduced-fat cheese, sliced vegetables or fruit. Serve with bagged salad or prepared vegetable soup.
• Rotisserie chicken, baked potatoes, frozen or canned vegetables
• Steamed shrimp, ready-to-heat brown rice or quinoa, canned or frozen vegetable
At work:
• Frozen or shelf-stable meal. See page 113 for nutrition guidelines.
• Liquid meal replacement. Look for one with at least 10 grams protein, but 20 grams is better, and no more than 3 grams saturated fat.
• Tuna or salmon from ready-to-serve pouches or easy-to-open cans and whole-grain crackers
• Whole-grain bread or crackers with peanut butter or almond butter
Plan for Snacks
Over the last few decades snacking has become a bit of a national pastime. We consume a few hundred more calories now than we did in the late 1970s, and most of the additional calories are eaten between meals. In fact, on average, we consume about one-quarter of our total calories as snacks. This makes planning for snacks as critical as planning for meals.
You may have heard that you should graze or snack often to rev your metabolism or to lose weight. This is one of those common pieces of advice that is inconsistent with current science. As discussed in Chapter 4 under Metabolic Rate, the thermic effect of food, or TEF (the extra calories burned to process food and nutrients), is not related to the frequency of eating, but is related to the type and amount of food you eat. The short story is, that over a full day, your metabolic rate will not differ if you eat the exact same foods in many small meals or fewer larger meals. Some people find that eating more often helps with appetite control, and others find that snacking often does little more than add calories to their total intake. Research studies also find various results, and experts say that there is no ideal eating frequency for weight control, blood glucose management, and cholesterol management.
To Snack or Not To Snack?
Whether or not noshing between meals is good for you depends on you. Do you like to snack? Does it help you manage your hunger? Does it fit into your day? Does it contribute to a nutritious diet?
• Enjoy a planned snack if it helps you tame appetite and rein in out-of-control eating later on. A piece of fruit on your afternoon commute, for example, may keep you from raiding the refrigerator when you get home, or it may help prevent overeating at dinner.
• Don’t snack to boost your metabolic rate. It doesn’t help.
• Snack when you’re hungry and a meal is more than a short time away. Don’t panic though. Regardless of what you’ve heard, being hungry doesn’t mean that you’re starving, wasting muscle, digesting your stomach lining, or suffering blood glucose swings. It simply means that you haven’t eaten for a while.
• Don’t snack because others are eating, because you’re bored, or because it’s your habit.
• Eat a planned snack to fit in wholesome foods. Ask yourself what you’re not getting enough of at meals. The answer is probably a good snack choice.
• Snack if you need to fuel a workout or replenish after a hard workout. There’s often no need to snack before or after a light or short workout.
Healthful Snacks
If snacking is right for you, identify healthful, tasty snacks to satisfy your hunger. It’s a good idea to keep a written list to avoid the mental drain of weighing options and relying on willpower every time you want a snack. Keep the list in your smartphone or on the refrigerator, kitchen counter, desk, or wherever it is that you will snack. Write down the appropriate portion size, and if you are counting calories, include that, too. Unless you are very active, your snacks should probably range from 100 to 250 calories each. Below are a few ideas, but the best ideas will probably be your own.
• Any fresh, frozen, canned, or dried fruit, preferably without added sugars
• 1/2 peanut butter sandwich on whole-grain bread
• Apple and peanut butter or almond butter
• 1 ounce of nuts, about 1/4 cup
• Fruit and nuts, such as a small pear and 1/8 cup walnuts
• Hummus with raw vegetables such as cucumber, cauliflower, bell peppers, and carrots
• Hummus and whole-grain crackers
• Strained yogurt (Greek or Icelandic) with fresh or frozen berries
• Low-fat cottage cheese with diced tomatoes, black pepper, and fresh basil leaves
• Low-fat cottage cheese and fruit
• 3–5 cups light popcorn
• Reduced-fat cheese and apple slices or grapes
• Vegetable juice or tomato juice with almonds or reduced-fat cheese
• Hard-boiled egg and whole-grain crackers
• Mashed hard-boiled egg on cucumber rounds
• 1 ounce roasted chickpeas and 1/8 cup dried fruit
• Snack bar of primarily whole grains or fruit or both whole grains and fruit
Be Empowered
• Write a list of three to five backup dinners. Add pantry and freezer staples to your shopping list.
• If you work away from home, create a list of foods to keep handy when you need a snack or lunch. Add them to your shopping list.
• Create your personal snack menu. Add any necessary items to your shopping list.
• Start or add to your recipe collection.
• Experiment with at least one of the menu-planning templates in Appendix B.