New Year’s Resolution: Healthy Meal Planning
By Ayelet Connell, PhD, PT, IMT,C
our health and our family’s health. But for most of us, as the year moves along, and we become more and more busy and ‘distracted’ with the ongoing stressful events of lives, we lose focus on ourselves and our health. It can feel like we’re slowly sinking into an old pat- tern that repeats itself every year. The key to shifting this pattern is finding an easy routine to help us plan for our weekly healthy meals.
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Initial Questions There are several steps to consider before the actual weekly shopping expedition: 1. What types of foods and flavors do you and your family enjoy? Are you meat eaters? Do you like fish? What types of flavor profiles? Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern?
2. When do you have the most free time? In the evening after the kids have gone to bed or maybe on a weekend morning?
3. Are you on your own in this process or can your partner or an- other family member help out?
4. Are you cooking just for yourself or for you and your family? Initial Planning Considerations
Here are some things that are helpful to consider before you shop:
1. Keep it simple! As we start to feel more accomplished in this meal planning process, we can get more creative in our cooking. Initially, it is much easier to be successful with ‘ongoing’ healthy meal planning if we create simple and delicious meals. To create a simple meal, let’s imagine an empty dinner plate. Here are the din- ner plate percentages for an optimally healthy meal that will help us feel energetic and revitalized: a. 25% natural meat (grass-fed beef; natural and hormone-free poultry; wild fish; natural lamb or other game meat such as bi- son; natural eggs)—the amount of protein on your plate should equate to the size of your palm or a deck of cards—about 3-4 ounces. b. 50% diverse multicolored vegetables—cooked and/or raw is great (you can vary the colors throughout the day and week!) c. 25% starchy root vegetables such as sweet potatoes or winter squash like acorn squash, spaghetti squash, rutabaga, and so on.
d. Healthy Fats!!! 1-2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil or co- conut oil; avocado, nuts and seeds. These fats are essential for a healthy brain, cardiovascular system, and so much more.
2. Let’s consider some examples of this type of dinner plate: a. Roasted chicken with sautéed kale and ginger with roasted peeled/chopped sweet potatoes
b. Wild salmon with roasted broccoli and pureed butternut squash with cinnamon
c. Grass-fed steak with steamed green beans and roasted multi- colored potatoes
14 Natural Nutmeg - January/February 2017
ew Year’s resolution time is upon us! For many of us, this includes making promises to ourselves to be healthy this year—to eat healthier and make a stronger commitment to
3. Be sure to cook extra food for dinner to provide you with leftovers for lunch. This makes your meal planning so much easier. If you are cooking for yourself, the leftovers will provide you with lunches and dinners. You can also repurpose the leftovers for the following dinner. For example: a. You could take left over roasted chicken and make chicken soup with mixed vegetables such as carrots, celery, parsnips.
b. You could make chicken or turkey salad and add in the leftover roasted potatoes and some chopped celery.
c. If you have leftover meat or fish, you could make a salad and top it with the protein and then create a homemade salad dressing with tahini and lemon juice and some gluten free soy sauce or Bragg’s aminos.
d. You could take leftover grilled salmon and make a salmon salad with it by adding chopped celery and celery salt and mayonnaise.
4. An optimal healthy diet is rich in anti-inflammatory foods which means foods that do not induce inflammation in the body such as diverse vegetables, natural protein, and healthy fats. When eating an anti-inflammatory diet for greater health, it is important to avoid inflammatory foods such as gluten, processed dairy, refined sugar, and overly processed foods. The easiest anti-inflammatory diet includes many diverse and multicolored vegetables, natural protein, starchy veggies such as root vegetables like sweet pota- toes, and healthy fats such as nuts and seeds and extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil. Being gluten free can be helpful, but often, avoiding a food like gluten causes us to search for replacements that can be overly processed like store bought gluten free snacks. Ideally, avoiding grain as a main focus of a meal and reserving it as an accessory to ‘some’ meals such as using gluten free whole grains like brown rice or quinoa as a side dish will help us with achieving optimal health.
Weekly Meal Planning: Let’s Get Organized To start the meal planning process, it is very helpful to have a piece of blank paper in front of you and mark out the meals for the week including breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You may find that you only need to plan out the weekday meals depending on whether you tend to eat out over the weekend, or maybe you and your family tend to eat in all week. Draw out the grid and leave an empty box to write in for each meal of each day that you are preparing for. As you become successful with this process over the course of a few months and it becomes second nature, you will depend less and less on this grid. Being more rigid with this process in the beginning will support you in your success.
As you view the grid, consider how many dinners worth of pro-
teins and veggies and starchy veggies you will need. Lunches usually don’t need to be counted because leftovers will usually count for lunches. As for breakfast, you may use some of the leftover protein for breakfast but mostly, it will also be a separate category. If you are
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