Three Tips to Help Stick to a Daily Meal Plan

Posted on October 19, 2011 by admin

Sticking to a daily meal plan can be a major adjustment since many people are used to eating whatever they want, whenever they want. Having the specifics of breakfast, lunch, and dinner planned out forces us to pay close attention to what we are eating. This means no eating out or excessive snacking throughout the day. A healthy meal plan or even a 17 day diet meal plan can definitely be hard to follow at first. However, there are a few things we can do to help stay with it.

Daily Meal Plan Strategies

Make a meal plan that is specifically designed and tailored to your weight loss goals. Consult a nutritionist or your trainer to make sure that you’re not taking in too much or too few calories. Then, write down everything you eat in your meal plan to make sure that you’re counting calories honestly and accurately. Don’t to forget to include drinks that are not zero calories when you’re adding up your calorie count for the day. Then, analyze the times when you go over your limit and ask yourself how you can change your behavior to prevent it from happening again.
Prepare breakfast and lunch the night before. Healthy meal plans are sometimes hard to follow because of time constraints. If you have a busy schedule, cooking in the morning and in the middle of the day can be a huge hassle. That’s why so many of us end up grabbing a pastry at a coffee shop on the way to work and eating out for lunch. It’s better to prepare these meals when you have a little extra time in the evening. You can just put them in a Tupperware container and reheat the next day. This can be done every weeknight to help you stay on track with your weekly meal plan.
Find a meal planning buddy. It’s easier to succeed if you aren’t doing it alone. Find a friend who will follow weekly meal plans with you. If you’re married, a spouse can be the perfect person to fill this role, since you probably always eat dinner together anyway. Spouses and friends can start diet meal plans together if they have a shared goal of losing weight. Researchers that study group diet meal plans, like Weight Watchers, have found that people who have moral support from peers with weight loss goals lose three times the amount that the loners lose in the first year and they keep it off, too. Get your friends and family involved and you’ll have more motivation to get and stay fit.
Reward yourself if you’ve consistently followed your meal plan for a couple of weeks. You should give yourself incentives to successfully give up some of your favorite foods and stick to the plan. For instance, you could go to the movies, get a massage, or go shopping at your favorite retail store. Healthy meal planning generally saves you money in the long run because you are not buying unnecessary items at the grocery store. So, you’ll probably have a little bit of money saved up to treat yourself. Don’t, however, reward yourself by eating more! “People generally overestimate the calories they are burning with exercise, and they may reward themselves by eating more,” says lead researcher Tim Church, director of preventive-medicine research at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. Instead, stick to your meal plan, save up some money, and do something special for yourself.

Following a meal plan isn’t always a breeze. If you prepare your breakfast and lunch the night before you eat them, you won’t become stressed about making them when you are pressed for time. Rewarding yourself for not straying from your healthy meal plan can help keep you motivated and convincing a friend or spouse to follow meal plans with you can be a huge help. Next time you’re embarking on a new diet meal plan, keep these tips in mind for ultimate success.

Meal Planning Ideas for Pairing Food and Wine

Posted on October 15, 2011 by admin

David Lynch, a James Beard Award-winning sommelier and author of Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy is surprisingly cynical about wines for a wine expert. Lynch describes the typical scenario: “You’re in a restaurant that takes wine very seriously, one where a thick, leather-bound, 25-page book arrives with great fanfare–and a thud–at the table.” However, he realizes, the everyday person “[Doesn’t] come to your restaurant to read a book.” The truth is, all we need is a nice wine to go with our meal, not an enormous, daunting wine list handed to us by a pressed waiter with a pair of condescending eyes. And, lucky for us, if we know the secrets of wine pairing we can have that nice wine, and great meal, in the comfort of our own home. All you have to do is learn the basic rules for wine pairing and you can turn a Friday night into a romantic and festive evening. Just hand the kids off to your sister or aunt, set the table, and read up on these meal planning ideas for a wonderful night of food and wine.

Basic Rules of Wine Pairing

Identify the properties and characteristics of the dish and go from there. Look at your grocery list ideas and then start thinking about what wine would best accompany those foods. For example, if you prepare a steak, couple it with a full wine. Both steaks and full wines are hearty and strong.
When in doubt, match regional cuisine with their regional wines or with wines from grapes of a similar soil and climatic condition. A tomato sauce pasta dish, for example, tastes delectable alongside a Tuscan Chianti, however French chablis (the grapes of which grow in a climate that retains their tangy edge) will serve this dish just as nicely.
Keep in mind that palates can be cleansed with either tannins or acids after a rich meal, like a steak or fried chicken dish. Tannins can come from the skins of the grapes used in winemaking or the wood barrels a wine may have been aged in. Tannin tastes similar to the flavor you would get if you sucked on a tea bag and causes a puckering of the gums. It’s this astringent flavor that helps strip the fats from your tongue and cleanses the palate after a fatty meal.
Match acids with acids. Acidic wines and cream don’t mix, unlike acidic wines with shrimp and lemon pasta. Anything sauteed in a lemon-butter such as salmon and shrimp cakes sauce tastes great with a Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio.

Last but not least, drink what you want and what makes you feel good! Your preferences should always take precedence over others’ recommendations, even if they’re coming from the mouth of a wine connoisseur.

A Meal Planning Chart and Other Organizational Tips for Your Kitchen

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

If you do the majority of the cooking in your family, you know how difficult it can be to cook in a disorganized kitchen. However, you don’t necessarily need a top-of-the-line professional kitchen to make delicious meals. Before you invest in space saving appliances and have your cabinetry overhauled to accommodate your kitchen needs, simply un-clutter your counters, organize your pantry, and make a meal planning chart – you’ll feel like you’re cooking in a professional-style kitchen in no time. Here are some meal prep organizational tips for any major cooking event:

The first thing to do when preparing a complex meal is to make a meal planning chart. So, what is a meal planning chart, exactly? This kitchen helper is simply a list or chart that you can make by hand (or computer) that lists the steps to your meal. These steps can be divided up into time and put in chronological order. The chart doesn’t have to be fancy, just something to help you stay focused as you cook and prepare everything in a timely, efficient, and orderly fashion. This will greatly assist your ability to make sure all the dishes are staged correctly and come out of the kitchen at the right time. Tape your chart up on the pantry or cupboard where you’ll be cooking and check off each task as you go.
Before you even boil your water or preheat your oven make sure that you start with a completely cleared dishwasher. The last thing you want is to start cleanup only to realize that you never ran the dirty dishes through the wash cycle. This will result in a major dish pileup in the sink and a stressful after-cooking mess.
Put your trashcan directly under the ledge on which you’re cutting. This will help you cut and clean, simultaneously. Just chop, then throw the remnants into the garbage in one swoop.

Designate a “chop time” in your meal planning chart and do all your cutting at once. While you cut, put a dishtowel under your cutting board to prevent it from shifting under you. Doing all off your cutting at one time will save you time in the long haul. After chopping up all of your ingredients, put them in separate bowls, throw a piece of saran wrap over each bowl, and pop them in the fridge until you’re ready to use each ingredient. This will keep all of your items fresh until their use.
Make sure that you’re cleaning up as you go. This includes keeping surfaces sanitized and disinfected (especially if you’re cooking with raw meats!), throwing pits, ends, stubs, bones, and fats in the trash as you go, or even quickly cleaning knives and soaking pots and pans while the main dish is cooking. Since you have (hopefully) completely cleared your dishwasher before cooking, you can easily throw any bowls, utensils, or pans in the dishwasher while you cook. Find a gap in your meal planning chart in which you can designate a “clean-up time.” This designated clean-up time will allow you to clear counters and cut out some after-cooking cleaning.
After your dish is finally completed, it’s time to store your leftovers. Make sure to label and date all food: a sharpie is a Chef’s best friend! If you have any extra chopped items, store them in individual baggies or in aluminum foil for your next cooking venture.

Overall, a meal planning chart, staging cooking and clean up, and strategic cooking will help you keep your kitchen area clean and tidy. After having a clean, professional-style kitchen, you’ll never be able to go back!

Tips to Compare Free Meal Planning Software

Posted on October 3, 2011 by admin

Celebrities, models, and athletes are now having their entire diet planned out for them, prepackaged, and sent directly to their doorstep as a way to keep in shape, look fit, and take all thought out of meal planning. These gourmet meal planning services may make meal planning a no-brainer, but they also cost their celebrity clientele anywhere from $25 to $50 a day. Meanwhile, we’re angrily writing out a grocery list, storming to the grocery store, sulking in the checkout line, swiping our cards, and slaving over the stove only to find that we’ve forgotten about five items we need for dinner. The truth is: we don’t need celeb food services to plan great meals with ease. There are plenty of free meal planning services out in cyberspace, ripe for the picking. Our meal planning regiment just got a whole lot more glamorous.

What Are My Meal Planning Options?

Meal planning services usually come in the form of apps, websites, or software that you download to your computer. Their perks or objectives differ depending on each service. Dictate ahead of time what you need from a service (Do you want to lose weight, save money, or simply plan meals ahead?) and research from there.

Apps: If you are constantly on your Blackberry, iPhone, or Android, you should definitely look into a meal planning app for your free meal planning. Apps usually have the ability to connect to a local supermarket so that you can tune into savings at your nearest store. These apps may or may not also have access to an archive of recipes. Try to find an app whose recipes are developed by chefs.
Websites: There are plenty of websites that are dedicated to efficient and/or healthy meal planning. The great thing about websites is that you can get updates on your meals straight to your inbox. Usually, websites contain a huge database of fellow users, so if you’re looking into connecting with a community of meal planners, a website could be beneficial to your meal planning goals. Personalize a profile with your meals and recipes when planning out your week. For those of us plugged into cyberspace, a website meal planner could be just the thing to make our grocery shopping a lot more organized.
Software: Meal planning software is rarely free, but you can get some softwares for as inexpensive as $30.00, while they generally run around $50.00. Softwares usually include video, nutritional facts, monthly planners, ingredient databases, printable formatting, cost calculations, kitchen inventory management, and aisle organization. Before buying softwares, see if you can download a free trial online, or consult the company directly and ask for a free trial.

Whether you’re examining an app, website, or software for free meal planning services, make sure you analyze an array of factors, including approachability, ease of use, and cohesiveness. You also want a service that’s reliable, which can be a problem with some websites and apps. While researching and trying out free meal planning services may seem time-consuming, whichever service you choose will save you tons of time in the future and take the thought out of planning for the week. For us busy moms, there’s nothing better than that.

Tapas Party Menu Plan

Posted on September 24, 2011 by admin

The Spanish know better than anyone else that if you’re drinking, you should always eat with your beverage. They also know that eating slowly and in smaller portions can help you metabolize your food more efficiently, digest easily, and simply catch up with your friends and family! Tapas are a great way to serve finger food if you’re throwing a dinner party, but they also make a great meal by themselves if you want to have a tapas dinner with the family. You can even give the kids a little Spanish history or geography lesson as you serve different tapas. The best thing about tapas? These dishes are made to be shared, giving us a great opportunity to taste, sample, and pick our favorite of many small, easy dishes, rather than hovering over one, main dish. If you want to have a tapas night, you can easily make a menu that can help you plan out your meal. Try a menu plan that includes tapas like these:

Patatas Bravas: Make some fried potato chunks for your own version of patatas bravas. Usually spiced with paprika and served with aioli sauce and ketchup on the side, patatas bravas go well with just about anything and are extremely inexpensive to make.
Tortilla Espanola: Unlike the tortilla we’re used to in the states, the tortilla espanola is made out of potatoes and egg, for a quiche-like dish. Cut the tortilla into slivers or cubes and serve as a tapa. If you have leftovers, serve tortilla espanola as a wonderful breakfast treat. This tortilla keeps extremely well and tastes even better the next day.
Croquettes: Cheese. Ham. Fried. These three factors combined give you a wonderful tapa: the croquette. You can make your croquette however you please, but we like ‘em with russet potatoes, ham, and, of course, breadcrumbs for adequate frying.
Anchovies: Served on top of broiled and crunchy slices of baguettes and drizzled with olive oil, anchovies are extremely common in Spain. While some people hate them, this tapa may just change their minds about anchovies.
Cheese and Olives: For a foolproof tapa, serve sliced cheeses, like Machego or Idiazabal cheese. You can also serve a bowl of Spanish olives for another no-brainer tapa.
Chorizo or Jamon Serrano: Sliced meat, much like sliced cheese, makes a wonderfully filling and extremely easy tapa. Sliced chorizo, a spicier Spanish sausage, or jamon serrano, a Spanish ham, could be perfect for the occasion. Slice a baguette and serve it along with your tapas so that your family can make mini sandwiches with jamon serrano and machego cheese, if they please.

With a great tapas meal, you will be surprised at how much family bonding you can do over the right menu plan. Just make sure to plan in advance and find tapas that your family will love, and you’ll surely have a night to remember.

Three Ways a Family Meal Plan Can Prevent Picky Eating

Posted on September 7, 2011 by admin

Choosy eating is something that many people go through at one point or another. In fact, picky eating, or “food neophobia,” is a completely healthy reaction to food for a child in their critical developmental stages. However, household picky eaters may not be making it easy on parents to prepare dinner every night. And, unfortunately, there’s no age limit to picky eating, so mom or dad may be the culprits of finicky eating, too. Luckily, a family meal plan, often aided by an online healthy meal planning service, can help provide a healthy, balanced diet to even the pickiest eaters in your household.

What is a “family meal plan?”

A family meal plan is a service, online application, or website, that helps you plan out your food for a week (or even a month). These services, like Food on the Table, allow you to select your recipes, choose the ingredients you want to work with, compare store sales, then organize and print your grocery lists.

How can a meal plan help my family?

If you sign up on a website that provides you with weekly meal plans, you’ll be able to pick from a number of ingredients, which are then combined to make recipe suggestions. Thus, you and your family can get together and decide what foods you want included in your meals and what foods you don’t. This will ensure that picky eaters find foods they like on their dinner plates. No more wasted meals!
A weekly meal plan helps you vary your meals, that way no one gets bored at dinner time with the same ol’ casserole night after night. While dining with picky eaters can sometimes get a bit dull, meal plans will give you suggestions for new recipes, that way the family cook can experiment. You can even play a little game by having picky eaters “review” new dishes, like hosts on a Food TV program. Your family will have a blast taste-testing at the table.
Healthy meal planning, when done collaboratively as a family, can encourage picky eaters to try new things. Ask picky eaters to sit down with you, look at recipes, and find what piques their interest. You may be surprised at their selections.

Using a family meal plan every week will help you please the picky eaters in your home. You never know: the fun of planning meals together might just encourage everyone in your family to venture out of their food comfort zones and go from picky eater to foodie.

Calculating Glycemic Index and Diabetic Meal Planning

Posted on September 5, 2011 by admin

The statistics on diabetes in the US are shocking: 18.8 million people have been diagnosed with diabetes, 7 million remain undiagnosed, and about 79 million people are pre-diabetic. Of course, diet plays a huge role in maintaining health for those with diabetes. If you or a loved one has been recently diagnosed with diabetes, you may be feeling overwhelmed with all of the dietary requirements. Luckily, it can be fairly easy to calculate glycemic index and find diabetic-appropriate meals.

Calculating The Glycemic Load of Your Meals

The glycemic index (GI) is a measure of the effect that a particular food has on your blood sugar level. A GI level can range from 0-100, glucose being 100 and foods with no carbs being 0. GIs can be found on diabetes databases for nearly every food, so just look your foods up online to calculate GI. The glycemic load (GL) is a ranking system for carbohydrate content in food portions based on their glycemic index and it combines both quality and quantity of the carbohydrates into one number, giving you the best way to gauge how blood glucose levels will change for different types and amounts of food.

You can approximate GL of a meal with simple calculations, multiplying the absolute GI value by the grams of available carbohydrates in the serving and dividing by 100:

GL = GI * Grams of Available Carbs / 100

For example, 1 cup of sliced bananas, or 225 g, has a GI of 52 and carb content of 45.5 g. Therefore, GL = 52 * 45.5 / 100 = 24. The GL of 1 cup of sliced bananas is therefore 24.

Use the GL of your meals to make sure that you are maintaining safe blood sugar levels.

Organizing the Food on Your Plate

While calculating GL and trying to determine your glucose levels, you may want to stick to a few rules which could help anyone struggling with diabetes eat healthier:

Fill the largest section of plate (about half of your dish) with non-starchy veggies, like broccoli, salad, green beans, and tomato.
Only 25% of your plate should be allotted to a small serving of starchy foods, like potatoes, corn, or rice.
The remaining 25% of your plate should be allocated for meat or a meat substitute, like beef, tofu, chicken, or turkey.
You can also add an 8oz glass of milk and a fruit salad for a complete meal.

While it may seem overwhelming at first, diabetic meal planning is easy once you learn the basics, like how to calculate glycemic load and organize your plate. Just stick to these rules and you’ll be healthier than ever.

Budget Meal Planning Tips: Using Coupons

Posted on September 4, 2011 by admin

Eighty-nine percent of Americans regularly use coupons when shopping for groceries according to the Nielsen Company and they are saving big, about $3 billion a year! Coupons are great assets to any family trying to meal plan on a budget. However, it can be tricky to get the most bang for your buck when using coupons. There are plenty of couponing strategies that can help you cut your grocery bills in half.

Tips for Using Coupons When Budget Meal Planning

You may have been using coupons for years, but do know all the tips n’ tricks to getting great deals? Here are some couponing secrets that may help you out in the long haul:

When cutting coupons out of the coupon insert in your newspaper, you will find a tiny date printed on the inside edge (or the side that has the binding on it, usually on the lefthand side of a book or magazine) of the coupon insert (the coupon pages that are inserted into your local newspaper). Instead of squinting and examining this date every time you go back into your coupon archives, write the date on the outside of the coupon with a sharpie to make it more visible.
Clip each group of coupons from the newspaper together to help you keep them compact. Then, store them based on your written date. You can often use these coupons for up to 6 months.
Compile your coupons as you get them by brand or type of food to save time when you need to grab them before shopping. Staple your coupon inserts or internet printouts together and cut when you’re ready to take them to grocery store.
As a general rule, buy the smallest or smaller size. When you’re looking at a bulk deal at the grocery store, do the math. Carry a calculator in your purse or simply do the calculations on your phone’s calculator function to dictate the price per ounce. While the bulk buy may be a better deal without your coupons, with the coupons you are getting more bang for your buck when purchasing the smaller item.
Buy items on rotation, based on your coupons. You’ll never be able to go and get all of your products at the same time if you’re really trying to save. Instead, buy in bulk when you’re purchasing non-perishables if you’re getting the lowest price per ounce.
Know the rules for each supermarket. Some Grocers triple coupons that are less than 50 cents, others accept competitors’ coupons. Get the facts so that you can be informed when you shop and look for coupons.

Once you master these tips, you’ll be a coupon queen in no time. With a little practice and some studying, you’ll be shocked at how much you can save when you’re using a budget grocery list and some sensible meal planning.