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.

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.

Seasonal Meal Plans

Posted on September 23, 2011 by admin

For some of us, eating seasonally is a no-brainer. You can save plenty of money on your produce by going straight to the seasonal stuff whenever you can. Even further, shopping seasonally is better for the environment and beneficial to the local economy. When you shop seasonally, your food is traveling shorter distances and, therefore, fewer pollutants are emitted in the process. The best part? Seasonal fruits taste better, too! While seasonal products do vary slightly from state to state, generally, the US has pretty standard seasonal produce cycles. Here are examples of seasonal produce for each season, with meals for each one:

Winter

Broccoli: Try making a warm broccoli casserole, or pair some broccoli rabe with Italian sausages and polenta.
Sweet Potatoes: Sweet potatoes are great in the winter time. Make a warm sweet potato pie with whipped meringue on top, or a creamy sweet potato soup.

Spring

Zucchini: Fried zucchini, grilled zucchini, however you make it, this vegetable is great in the spring. Try serving honey glazed chicken with a side of roasted zucchini, onion, and yellow bell peppers, seasoned with olive oil and peppers.
Lettuce: Lettuce is ripe and ready in the spring time so use this veggie for your lunch salads during the springtime months. Arugula, baby spinach, chives, herbs, sliced almonds, and goat cheese could be combined make a mouthwatering side dish.

Summer

Corn: Corn is a classic summer dish. Try making summer corn chowder with bacon, or simply serve your corn on the cob with garlic butter for a great side at an outdoor BBQ.
Watermelon: Cool down in the summer months with watermelon sorbet that’s the perfect, healthy dessert for warm summer nights. You can also make a watermelon, pecan, and gorgonzola salad that works great on a bed of fresh lettuce.

Autumn

Cranberries: Cranberry sauce goes great with turkey on Thanksgiving, but it can also be made into an autumn strudel with squash and cranberries, or a cranberry beef stew. The cranberry stew can be made with an economical chuck roast, beef broth, pearl onions, mushrooms, egg noodles, and, of course, cranberry sauce.
Pumpkin: Around Halloween and Thanksgiving, everyone has a hankering for pumpkin pie. Bursting with flavor, this veggie can be introduced to practically any dish, sweet and savory alike. Pumpkin soup, pumpkin oatmeal muffins, and best of all, pumpkin pie all taste great when the leaves are falling from the trees.

Having a seasonal healthy meal planner and shopping seasonally can help you cut down your grocery store bill while getting fresher and riper food straight to your table. Don’t hesitate to make traditions around your house based on these seasonal treats.

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.

7 Day Diet Plan

Posted on September 2, 2011 by admin

The statistics aren’t exactly in our favor: around two-thirds of dieters regained more weight within four or five years than they initially lost. If you’ve regained all the weight you lost, you may feel as though you’ll never sustain your goal weight. However, there are ways to get back on the bandwagon and back on track after you’ve gained weight. Try starting with a simple 7 day diet plan. These plans are achievable, no fad, no starvation diet needed. If you want to get back on track, try checking out some our article on healthy family recipes for some 7 day diet meal plans, and continue with them if they work for you.

BIGGEST LOSER DIET MEAL PLAN
Nutritionist from the television show, “Biggest Loser,” Chery Forberg, RD was asked to come up with a 7 day diet plan. This plan has 3 meals and 2 snacks a day: 45% carbohydrates, 30% protein, and 25% healthy fats. Also, Forberg suggests that you drink zero calorie and low calorie drinks, such as coffee, tea, and water. Designed by a nutritionist, this is an extremely healthy daily meal plan. The biggest lower diet meal plan also highly encourages 60-90 minutes of moderate exercise four times a week, so get on your bike and start spinning!

THE FULL PLATE DIET
This 7 day diet plan was developed by Lisa MacDonald, nutrition manager at Miraval Life in Balance, a spa in Tucson, Arizona. She did some healthy meal planning to help her customers lose weight and leave her facility feeling their best. The full plate diet is a nutrient-rich 7 day diet plan with a balance of carbohydrates, protein, and fat in every meal. The great thing about the plan is that it is flexible. You can mix and match parts or if you like a certain meal, then you can have it as often as you wish during the 7 day period.

CARB LOVERS DIET MEAL PLAN
If you love carbs, you may want to try a simple carb-lovers diet plan that allows you to indulge in your favorite food group. During the first week, avoid alcohol, salt, and soda as much as you can and drink plenty of water. A carb-lovers diet meal plan also recommends that you drink a specially formulated hot tea, which can help you burn off an extra 80 calories a day. Additionally, add plenty of vitamin C to your diet within the first 7 days, which can help you absorb essential nutrients. You can add some vitamin C to your diet by squeezing lemon juice in your drink or simply taking the recommended amount of vitamin C tablets. Overall, add beans and fiber to your diet to help you suppress appetite and, more importantly, _never_ skip meals.

Following a 7 day diet plan is great if you only have a few pounds to lose or if you want to trim down before a vacation or event. If you want to lose more than two or three pounds, then you will find yourself choosing a diet meal plan, such as, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, Mediterranean Diet or a low calorie diet. If you stick to your diet, you should have no problem shedding the pounds to ultimately look and feel spectacular.

Find Consistency with a Healthy Weekly Meal Plan

Posted on September 2, 2011 by admin

According to the Mayo Clinic, we can minimize our risk of breast cancer simply by limiting alcohol, controlling our weight, and making other healthy choices. We all know that eating healthy will greatly increase our quality of life. However, when we’re trying to live a healthier lifestyle, we always wonder what the “secret” to functioning at our highest capacity really is. Is it counting calories? Eating healthier foods? Exercising more? Many healthcare professionals contend that consistency and routine are the keys to health and happiness. Regular exercise, consistent sleeping patterns, and eating schedules could help you feel and look better than ever. The best way to establish consistency in your eating patterns is to make a healthy weekly meal plan each week. This way, you’ll be adhering to healthy meal planning that is complemented by exercise and sleep and that you can execute consistently as the weeks go by.

How to Make a Healthy Weekly Meal Plan

There are plenty of ways to go about making a healthy meal plan, however your meal plan should take the following factors into account for optimal success:

Plan not only what you’re going to eat, but also times to eat. To speed up your metabolism, try planning mini meals several times a day, eating every 3-4 hours.
Plan out specific meals that you will eat and take your nutrient levels into consideration. If you are magnesium deficient, implement more spinach salads into your diet or if you’re iron deficient, plan to eat more egg yolks or dried fruit.
Make sure to include snacks to tide you over and always have food on you so that you resist going out to eat or snacking on unhealthy items.
Include a grocery list filled with items that you will need to achieve your healthy weekly meal plan. This will help you keep focused when you’re at the grocery store and leave the store with everything that you need right in your shopping bags.
Also include exercise times in your meal plan. This will help you build some accountability into your meal plan. If it’s written down and your schedule is free in that time frame then there’s no excuse for missing that 7:00 am work out.
Note that you should be drinking 8-10 8 oz. glasses of water a day, about 64 oz. If you’re exercising heavily or if you indulge in high sodium meals, add more water to your diet.
Have a weight log if you’re also trying to implement weight management into your healthy weekly meal plan. Once or twice a week, weigh yourself in the morning to stay motivated. Don’t abuse the scale, however. The numbers are sometimes deceiving and you should take factors like water retention into account when you’re weighing in. Make sure to have a pair of jeans or dress that you try on periodically to track your weight loss, instead.
You can track a variety of things in your healthy weekly meal plan, including how full you feel after certain meals to dictate levels of satiation or satisfaction of certain foods. You can also track mood or energy levels to track your progress.
Plan when you need to go to bed so that you get ample sleep. The more sleep, the more time your body has to re-energize and reboot.

Healthy weekly meal plan can help you do much more than plan out your meals: it can give you a way to track and gauge your moods, weight, size, grocery lists, and sleep patterns so that you can achieve consistency and, ultimately, feel great.