10:04:52 Are you feeling overwhelmed trying to figure out how to eat healthy, how to pick foods that are going to help you lose weight, feel good in your body, and do all that while still having kids and a life
10:05:04 and work and all the things that are required of us.
10:05:08 I have heard and said more times than I would ever love to admit
10:05:14 that I don't have time. I just don't have time.
10:05:16 And the truth is, when we talk about what we're planning for our meals.
10:05:22 The absolute truth is
10:05:23 that we still figure out how to eat. We're still eating even though we're busy.
10:05:29 So what helped me was learning that if I do this ahead of time, if I put just a little bit of thought in it.
10:05:37 I can have it already decided and then it doesn't have to be decided then. And deciding
10:05:43 was one of the things that made it so hard for me.
10:05:46 deciding what to have
10:05:49 deciding if I was going to stay on my plan or were we just going to like say, you know, to the wall and we're getting pizza? Like what was it we were deciding? Because we're going to decide something. Everybody still got fed.
10:06:00 So if I decide ahead of time.
10:06:03 I can think about what does my busy schedule look like this week?
10:06:07 Is there anything I really want? Is there anything I want to cook? Sometimes I want to.
10:06:12 I don't. And so I learned how to have everything I want
10:06:18 And make it all okay. That's the key part here. Make it all okay.
10:06:23 So when I was thinking I'm too busy for everything, I was also thinking it had to look a certain way.
10:06:29 It had to look like I cooked from scratch all the meals.
10:06:34 And so I uh
10:06:39 We have our Thanksgiving at the beginning of November, so I'm recording this after we've already had our Thanksgiving.
10:06:44 And I think it actually gets published the day after Thanksgiving but
10:06:49 I used to for Thanksgiving, think I had to make everything from scratch, all the pies from scratch, the doughs from scratch. I had to make all the bread from scratch. I had to make the mashed potatoes from scratch. I had to make everything and it all had to look a very certain way.
10:07:04 Or it said something about me.
10:07:07 It said that I didn't care enough about my family. It said that I did not
10:07:13 know how to cook or I wasn't skilled enough. It had a lot of things that apparently I made that all mean.
10:07:20 And so with my weight loss.
10:07:23 When I made it mean
10:07:25 that if I wasn't cooking from these super healthy meals every single night of the week, I didn't love my family.
10:07:32 I made it mean that if I wasn't eating
10:07:36 a certain way, vegetables every single meal, then I didn't care about my health or my weight loss.
10:07:42 If I ever ordered takeout or I ever ordered any pizza, it meant that I was giving up on my weight loss.
10:07:49 That is a lot for one thing
10:07:53 to mean. And it doesn't mean anything. It just means that's the option. And sometimes I can tell you that's
10:07:59 still the option as I plan ahead.
10:08:03 But what I did learn was when I started to drop what it had to look like, I became so much more open to what it could.
10:08:12 look like and those coulds made it even easier for me to get healthy food, for me to feel really great in my body. It didn't have to look a certain way.
10:08:22 So I want to give you some tips because
10:08:25 Until I realized like these other things were also acceptable, I was putting all that pressure on myself for it to look only one way. And the only one way was for me to spend an hour and a half in the kitchen making meals every single night.
10:08:39 And I went through some transitions. Eventually the transition went to where I spent a crazy amount of time
10:08:46 And would make a ton of freezer meals. And I can tell you that my husband got tired of freezer meals. He said that he wanted something that had texture because at one point I put everything through the crock pot because that's what I felt like I had time with.
10:08:59 And so it's kind of fun to watch my evolution of cooking and my dinner planning because it got me really good at many different ways.
10:09:09 of finding food. So when I was on the crock pot kick.
10:09:13 I would get everything for so many of these meals, all the recipes. I would combine how much chicken I need. I would combine how many potatoes I needed, how much of all the different things. I would go to the store and buy it.
10:09:24 And I had these spreadsheets all laid out. And so I don't know how many times I did this. It was impressive. I'm telling you, I felt impressed with myself. Friends were impressed with me.
10:09:34 And it is still fun sometimes, but I don't do it this way anymore.
10:09:39 At that time, I would then, I would make freezer bags
10:09:42 And I would dump everything in it that that crock pot recipe would need.
10:09:47 And my son growing up, he was amazed that we got to take all these really fun vacations
10:09:53 And he didn't realize it was because mom brought all the food with her. And so we might be in a hotel or in a condo and I would bring my trusty crock pot with me.
10:10:02 put my little liner in it and dump my meal in before we go out for our adventure of the day. But it gave us meals. And so they were easy and it was one time of thinking about it. And it was intense, but it was one time
10:10:16 After that, I kind of moved away from crock pot meals for a while and only like on one night a week that I had to work super late, we would have a crock pot meal. And my husband was okay with that because
10:10:26 he had texture in his food again, he said.
10:10:29 And so, and I have learned you can use a crock pot and then you can add some things that still have some texture to them. And so
10:10:36 You could make the meat and then add something else like the rice to it later. There's lots of ways you can use a crock pot, but
10:10:43 The crock pot was probably the one I felt the safest with in the beginning for time saving.
10:10:49 Some of the things I did after that, I learned that I could buy some food at takeout that were some of my best options. And so
10:11:00 One of the things I do with my clients when I work with them
10:11:04 is we try not to create fear or restriction around certain kinds of food, including takeout.
10:11:12 And so we all know there are foods that are going to be more nutritional for us than other nutrient dense.
10:11:19 And so one of the things I teach is this method called good, better, best.
10:11:23 And so I tell them that there's no bad food and then the best foods are going to be like fruits and vegetables, meats, whole grains, dairy products.
10:11:32 And it's not added sugar. It's not processed. It's not fried. It's not all those other things. Those are just good foods. They're good because they taste good.
10:11:41 And so the only bad foods are foods you don't like. And so we have what best foods are and we have good foods. And then anything you can level up is a better food.
10:11:48 And so what I try to explain to them is.
10:11:52 Go through your menus at restaurants and pick good, better, and best options for each restaurant.
10:11:58 And things that you like, things that maybe you're like, oh, I don't normally order this. But if I was trying to like pick a better or a best food, these would be better options or better or even a great option.
10:12:10 And so I figured out some best options. And so some of my best options, I love fajitas. And so I would order a big
10:12:20 a big dinner of fajitas from the restaurant. And I learned that certain things we just leave off or we ask for them on the side.
10:12:29 So they'll store longer. I also loved going, we have some friends that own a Chinese restaurant. And so I would ask for my
10:12:37 rice and my stir fried vegetables and meat.
10:12:40 And I would ask for like a double order. And so we would have that for meals for a couple of days.
10:12:46 And so with those two meals, I could ask for double orders at the restaurant and then I could portion out. It's not like a free for all, like, oh, we went to dinner. We should eat it all up in one night.
10:12:57 It was, here's the serving for everybody. And then we would put like our nachos with it or we would put something else with it but
10:13:05 we would have that as the meal and it would last for a couple meals. So I could order two
10:13:12 to take out and have four days worth of meals off of it. It was great. And I had vegetables. I had meat.
10:13:19 It had, you know, grains in there. It was great.
10:13:24 And so sometimes I would say like no sour cream or no queso, or I would ask for that stuff all to be on the side for my family to have it if they wanted it.
10:13:31 And so I just leveled up my foods, but I would do takeout too. And some nights I knew we were just so busy that we were going to get
10:13:41 drive through somewhere. So maybe I would pick Arby's. I loved the roast beef sandwiches at Arby's because usually I would throw half the bun away and just eat the roast beef.
10:13:52 salads at Wendy's were amazing. I still think they're some of the best salads ever.
10:13:57 I love the baked potato and a small chili. So I'll get a plain baked potato when I pour my small chili on top of my baked potato.
10:14:04 So I would have places that I felt really confident that I was going to feel great after I ate that.
10:14:11 And then it would have been something I probably would have cooked at home. So I had options for carryout. I had options for drive-through. I had options for the
10:14:20 Crock pot meals. Sometimes I would do the salad bar in my freezer or not my freezer. Oh girl, don't put that in your freezer. Salad bar in the refrigerator.
10:14:29 And so I would chop everything up ahead of time and I would meal prep it all.
10:14:32 And then I would just scoop out my salads. I can tell you I have now as an empty nester decided I rarely want to chop vegetables. And so I buy salad bowls that are already pre-made for me. And sometimes I add a few things to them, but they're already pre-made and it's real easy just to take that lid off.
10:14:50 I have learned that there's lots of things I can prep at home. One of my favorite things is
10:14:56 called batching. And so sometimes what would happen, especially when our son was young and we were, you know, kind of just
10:15:05 young getting by, you know, trying to make all of our pennies count. And so if pork went on sale or chicken went on sale, I would buy just a big bunch
10:15:13 And then I would do this batching. So we would cook it all up.
10:15:17 Whether it was ground beef or chicken or pork. And then I would make like roasted meat and vegetables in the oven.
10:15:25 I would take all the cooked chicken or all the whatever the meat was we chose. I would make stir fry with it the next day, tacos with it another day. Maybe I would make some kind of a soup with it.
10:15:34 Usually I could figure out a way to make it into a pasta dish. One of my favorites was when I was kind of trying to come into that leveling up that better best
10:15:46 kind of thinking, trying to have some more of those throughout the week than just the good items.
10:15:53 I loved that my family liked easy things. And instead of making fettuccine Alfredo with chicken, I would get
10:16:02 the rotisserie chicken, I would put steamed broccoli in the bowl. I would put some chicken on top. And instead of noodles, I would bake
10:16:11 a small portion of Alfredo sauce and drizzle it on top of the chicken and it would drain through to the broccoli.
10:16:17 And so sometimes they ask for noodles too, but I am not super tied to noodles. It's not one of my favorite things. So I am absolutely okay with just a little bit of that Alfredo sauce to be on my chicken and on my broccoli. And it was more of a bowl of broccoli with chicken with that little bit of sauce. And so
10:16:34 Lots of different things. Sometimes I would take the meat and I would make it like a pressed sandwich with it.
10:16:41 We would put it on top of a salad.
10:16:43 all kinds of really fun things. Some of my favorite salads
10:16:47 were from trying to figure out this batch cooking where you make one meat and then you do so many different things with it. My husband does not like leftovers. And so I used to call them makeovers.
10:16:57 I would make over whatever the leftover was.
10:17:00 And so I absolutely love taking ground beef.
10:17:04 And making tacos with it. I love taking ground beef and making taco salads. I love it.
10:17:09 When I don't have, like maybe we had a bunch of extra hamburgers left over from a cookout.
10:17:14 I would chop them all up and I would make Big Mac salads. So if you've been to McDonald's and you have the Big Mac, so think of everything that's on it. Lettuce, tomato, pickles.
10:17:24 It has the special sauce, the Thousand Island sauce. And so I would put all that in the bowl with the seasoned ground beef that we'd already had from the hamburgers. I'd just chop it all up, run it through the food processor, whatever.
10:17:36 And that pickles with that Thousand Island dressing, oh my heavens, it's delicious.
10:17:41 So amazing. Another one I would do sometimes is if we had a ton of sausage and it can be breakfast sausage, whatever kind of sausage leftover or pork item, ground pork item.
10:17:53 I would make an egg roll in a bowl. And so you think about what an egg roll has in it and it's all of the cabbage and carrots and all of the yummy flavors. And I would make an egg roll in a bowl. So it's basically that pork, the leftover pork with
10:18:07 So much deliciousness. And these were just makeovers. I would call them makeovers my husband would not
10:18:14 think I just kept pushing leftovers. Sometimes we'll do one day I can get out of it, but not a ton.
10:18:21 The other thing, make ahead. If you are actually cooking.
10:18:24 Just go ahead and cook a little extra or double the recipe right then when you're cooking it.
10:18:29 And instead of
10:18:31 If you had dinner leftovers, instead of like throwing them down the drain or just eating the extras because there happened to be there.
10:18:39 either eat them for lunch the next day or package them up so that they'll be easy to eat another time.
10:18:44 And so we call it eating out of our freezer. And so we have a lot of things that are already cooked. So when I had too much queso one time, I made a big giant batch of queso for everybody and I had a bunch left over.
10:18:56 I froze it into these um
10:19:00 Oh, our bartenders set has the square ice cube trays. And so they're kind of big, thick for bourbon glasses. And so I froze the queso in those. So if we wanted to have a little bit of queso for the night, my husband and I were empty nesters. There's just two of us.
10:19:17 We can get out a block of queso and it's just enough for each of us to have some.
10:19:22 And so we do stuff like that. I have pulled pork in my freezer, leftover chili in my freezer, all the fun things.
10:19:28 And it's a matter of just pulling it out and heating it up and so
10:19:32 A lot of times I would double the recipe when I wanted to start building up my freezer.
10:19:37 And now that it's built up, I eat out of it. Quite often, I'll be like, okay, I'm going to make two cooking two meals this week. That's what I have time for. I'm planning on leftovers a couple nights. We're going to eat something out of our freezer one night.
10:19:51 And maybe we get pizza or we go out somewhere one night. And so that can be as simple
10:19:58 as it has to be. And so when I learned that you really, really can
10:20:03 eat super healthy.
10:20:05 And keep it so easy.
10:20:08 it took all that power away from my thoughts of how hard it has to be and how I'm never going to figure this out in my family and all the things I was saying, right? My family's never going to eat that way. You know what?
10:20:18 If some people don't eat onions, great. Leave the onions on the side. Some people don't eat cheese. Great. Leave the cheese on the side.
10:20:25 I found a lot of things I could make. Before I jump off, another one of my favorite ones is called the bar, the bar. So whether it's a chili bar, a soup bar, a potato bar, a pizza bar. And so the idea is when you have a lot of picky people, you just lay the things out.
10:20:42 And they get to put in it what they want. It's so much fun. We have big family gatherings and we do that one a lot.
10:20:50 Sometimes I would get the white corn tortillas that you'd use for tacos and we would make that into our
10:20:58 Pizza. So it would be the bottom of our pizza because it's whole grain.
10:21:02 And it's very thin, you know, so it went into that leveling up for me of the betters into the better categories. And then I would just put my pizza toppings on there. And so pizza night can be great because it can be
10:21:15 Anything you have left over and then you throw tomato sauce out of a can on the plate and cheese
10:21:20 And you just roast everybody. It's so easy. So, so easy so
10:21:26 I hope that you feel like it doesn't have to look a certain way because, man, that's imposing when we think we all have to look like
10:21:35 We are Martha Stewart or the whatever, Betty Crocker, whatever the home person is of your age group. What was it? The Leave it to Beaver show where the mom always had the dinner on the plate or on the table for as soon as the husband got home.
10:21:51 Whatever you think it's supposed to look like. Oh girl, it doesn't. It can be so easy.
10:21:55 And I don't know if you heard me at the beginning say.
10:21:58 I don't even cut up the salads anymore. I buy a salad bowl. They're like $2.
10:22:04 And so I would rather have a $2 salad bowl than save a couple bucks on the salads. But that's where I'm at right now in life.
10:22:11 And so I typically buy
10:22:14 So many yogurts. I buy so many salad bowls. I buy a package of rotisserie chicken a week that's already pre-shredded.
10:22:22 I do a lot of that stuff that's super time saving. If I'm wanting to look at something, I will run over and I will look in the freezer section at what frozen vegetables are available.
10:22:31 I'm super cautious about looking at the
10:22:35 sauces they put on there because sometimes it has a ton of hidden sugars and
10:22:40 fats and oils and things that I don't want. Not that you can't have some of that, but I want to know what's in it so that I can make some choices.
10:22:47 But just getting some ideas of grouped up vegetables together. I've bought the veggies in the produce section that are already cut for me.
10:22:56 Whatever makes it easier for you. And so when I know that my schedule looks
10:23:01 kind of crazy. Or sometimes like we're getting ready to go on a vacation
10:23:06 I know that I don't want a bunch of extra food in the house. I don't want to have to do a bunch of extra things. And so sometimes I'm just buying
10:23:13 The best case scenario freezer meals.
10:23:16 I like to find the ones that are better, higher in protein, higher in fiber and lower in
10:23:22 sugar, which a lot of times I look for the lower calorie, not that it needs to be lower calorie, but that helps me kind of see what maybe might be hidden in there.
10:23:30 And I'll do those in some, you know, like I said, I'll use the
10:23:36 The yogurts, I'll use the salad bowls, I'll use the rotisserie chicken, and I buy some freezer meals. And sometimes that's what my groceries look like. So it doesn't have to look a certain way. It just has to be something that's easy for you.
10:23:49 Something that makes it very convenient for you and something that feels good in your body. You're going to know if it's
10:23:56 needing to be healthified. If you need to level up a little bit with your nutrients because you're not losing weight or you're not feeling good in your body. And so it is.
10:24:05 truly that simple, truly that simple. And so there are so many meal in the beginning, I used e-meals so that they would tell me like they would tell me recipes.
10:24:16 Before that, I used HelloFresh and they sent me the ingredients because I didn't know how to pair things together.
10:24:22 We live in an age that there are so many options. I have a friend whose boyfriend, he is a personal chef. I have another friend who she used to do that same thing. They would just make up all these meals ahead of time or they'd go into your house and make them and then they would stock your fridge with them.
10:24:37 Depending on what your budget is, there are so many options. It does not have to look like takeout every night. So I hope that you got a couple. If you got some options that I didn't mention, I would
10:24:48 I love a good tip. We all do.
10:24:50 please message me with your good tips for anything that I didn't cover. I would love to hear it to be able to share it.
10:24:58 please check out the show notes for the next set of resources. Oh my gosh, I am always putting stuff out on social media. I am doing free calls for people if you're ready to start losing weight and you're wanting that one-on-one help.
10:25:14 I have pre-calls in there. There's webinars that I do, all kinds of things. Check out the show notes for the resources.
10:25:19 I'll see you next time.
