Planning for each phase of Always Eat After 7 PM is one of the keys to success. It’s been said that nobody ever plans to fail—they just fail to plan! Additionally, you’re much more likely to make great food choices when you plan and cover your bases ahead of time. Proper planning requires three easy actions: mapping out weekly menus, shopping, and food prep—in that order.
PLAN YOUR WEEKLY MENUS
In each phase of the plan, I’ve shown you how to structure your meals and your nighttime snack. There is a template you can use, especially if you want to customize your meals. Otherwise, I provide 14 days of sample menus for each phase. You can certainly follow these menus to the letter if you wish, but they are equally useful as a starting place to develop your own meal plans.
SHOP FOR APPROVED FOOD
Once you have your meal plan for the week in place, you’ll need to go grocery shopping for anything that’s currently not in your pantry or fridge. Buying your groceries ahead of time will let you prep and cook in advance for additional convenience.
Making healthy choices at the grocery store keeps you on track through every phase of the plan. Look over the recipes and the meal choices, and decide what you need to purchase. You may already have many items in your kitchen now; what you buy depends on what you have on hand and what you intend to prepare.
PREP FOR CONVENIENCE
Instead of panicking about what to put on the table or frantically trying to throw something together, get in the habit of meal prepping. It involves taking a couple of hours on the weekend or during the week to prep your food for the upcoming week. It ensures that you have your meals ready quickly, no matter how busy your days get.
Another huge benefit of meal prepping is portion control. We’re often seduced to eat a little more, go for seconds, or stop at a restaurant that serves you an entire cow on a plate. But when you prep meals at home in advance, you can give yourself just the right amount of food—exactly as prescribed on the Always Eat After 7 PM plan.
There are several ways to prep and cook in advance, including weekly, twice weekly, daily, and long term (which involves freezing). Personally, I prefer going with the twice-weekly approach, but let’s quickly review all four.
With the weekly option, you might spend time on Sunday (or a day when you have lots of spare time) doing all your major cooking for the week—cutting veggies for salads and placing them in containers, cooking Super Carbs so they can be reheated, hard-boiling eggs, baking or roasting proteins, and/or making desserts. You’d then store the prepped food in the fridge to be quickly assembled into meals and reheated.
The twice-weekly option is very similar, with the exception that you prep and cook twice a week (once at the beginning of the week and then again midweek). I like this option best because it’s still highly convenient and you can enjoy fresher food from Thursday to Saturday.
The third option is to cook all your food for the day each morning, but this may not be realistic if you’re getting kids to school or rushing off to work. But if you’re home all day or have a flexible schedule, this is a great approach. You can also try prepping the ingredients in the morning, then cooking them in the evening.
Finally, the long-term option is something you can do anytime. With many dishes, you can prepare all the ingredients needed for a meal, place them in ziplock freezer bags, and toss them in the freezer. They can then be thawed when needed. The meals are not cooked the day they are prepared—just the ingredients that go in them. If you are going to slow-cook your dinner, put the frozen ingredients in the slow cooker in the morning and the entrée will be cooked by dinnertime. Then just make a salad and some sides to accompany the meal. You can also freeze certain leftovers, such as soups and casseroles, and dishes like lasagna.
It’s really up to you as long as the approach you select doesn’t leave you unprepared.
Now, here are several meal prep hacks that help too:
•So that you can see the contents, use containers that are clear plastic or glass to store produce in the refrigerator that you have already washed, cut up, and pre-portioned for snacks or meal ingredients. I like to use clear glass containers rather than plastic because they are more environmentally friendly, but clear plastic containers or sealable bags also work.
•Cook protein in bulk at the beginning of the week. For me, this means cooking several days’ worth of chicken breasts or thighs, extra-lean ground beef, and fish. These are staple sources of protein I eat weekly, and having them ready to go makes eating these favorites easy. (If you’re cooking fish, though, eat it within 48 hours of cooking because it has a shorter refrigerator life than other proteins.)
•Keep healthy, highly versatile ingredients on hand. One example is beans, which are not only a great source of plant protein and a wonderful Super Carb but also an ingredient in lots of dishes, including salads, soups, and chili. Another example is grains such as quinoa or rice. They store easily in airtight containers and can serve as a side dish to any meal. I also recommend frozen steam-in-bag veggies. Frozen vegetables offer the same nutritional value as fresh ones, but with the convenience of microwave cooking in less than five minutes. What’s more, they make great side dishes.
•Love your leftovers. Don’t stress out by thinking you have to cook a new meal when you still have some food left from the last one. The meal plans in this book call for leftovers on some days so that no food goes to waste. You can also repurpose leftovers by combining them with other foods to make new meals. Try slicing leftover chicken and tossing it into black bean pasta for a great pasta salad. Or use leftover potatoes for lunch (or a cheat day breakfast). Roasted veggies from dinner are delicious on salads for lunch. There’s no end to how creative you can get with leftovers.
•Cook wisely for a crowd of one. If you are single, you probably don’t need to cook that much food. To make sure no food goes to waste, purchase food in smaller portions—a Cornish hen instead of a big chicken, a single pork chop rather than a large pork roast, a single fish fillet instead of a family pack. Then prep and cook only what you’re going to eat.
GO!
As we get ready to turn to the recipes, remember the importance of proteins, Super Carbs, non-starchy vegetables, fruits, and friendly fats—which all form the foundation of Always Eat After 7 PM. These are the foods designed to change your metabolism, regulate key hormones, and get you to your ideal weight.
Day by day, over the upcoming weeks, you will begin losing the weight you want to lose, and living the empowered, energized lifestyle you want to live. Once you get started cycling through the phases, once you begin eating all these delicious foods—even after 7 PM!—it gets easier and easier.