Need Help Planning Meals? BEST Tips to Get Started
Are you one of those people who says they can’t meal plan?
Lots of people tell me they WANT to meal plan but they just don’t know where to start.
If that’s you or if you then this podcast episode is for you!
Or if you are someone who already meal plans but wants to refine your process and make it a little easier than this conversation is for you.
I mean who doesn't want to make meal planning easier?
Transcript of the Episode
Hi, friends, it's Andrea Heyman here with another episode of Adventures In Feeding My Fam. Are you one of those people who says they can't meal plan. Lots of people tell me that they want to meal plan, but they just don't know where to start. So they have this paralysis, and never find a way to get over the hump, start meal planning, and have a system that really eases things because we know that meal planning can make things much, much easier. It's very beneficial. And I go into more detail about this in one of my other episodes, but meal planning can save time save money, we eat healthier when we have a regular meal plan. So there are lots of reasons to do it. But today, we're going to give you those first tips that can help you get going. So even if you're someone who already does meal planning, you can take a listen, in order to refine your process. And maybe you'll pick up a few little additional tweaks that you can make to your system to make meal planning even easier, and more convenient for you. So I think this conversation is for everyone. All right, raise your hand, if you joined me last weekend, last Sunday for the webinar that I gave, we had so much fun, we talked about how we can eliminate that diet culture that keeps us from really meeting our wellness goals. So march first, I am super excited because that is the day I'm launching my six week group coaching program called from emotional eating to food freedom. I suspect this is unlike any program you've ever done or heard of before, we're really shifting away from a lot of those tactical things that we typically think about when we talk about dieting and weight loss. And we're gonna go super deep, and get to the core of what is really making you eat. You know, it's that subconscious sabotage that prevents you from meeting your health and wellness goals. I mean, we tell ourselves all the time that we want to eat healthier, you know, think about the patient that has high blood pressure, who knows? If she changed her eating habits, then she could possibly come off her blood pressure medication. So who doesn't want that? We all want that. But most of us don't believe it's possible. Yes, I'm gonna say it again. Most of us don't believe in ourselves. And I know that is a super heavy statement. But let that sit there for a minute. We don't really believe in ourselves. Because we've had so many failures in the past, and we need to change that. I do believe that you can meet your health and wellness goals, I really do. But you have to do the work and retrain the way you approach food, retrain your subconscious thoughts. retrain that self talk and begin to approach food with gratitude as opposed of fear. We really want gratitude there so that we can appreciate the food, appreciate what it does for ourselves, begin to eat in a more mindful fashion. That ultimately is a really important component in order to meet those goals that you really want to achieve. So the link is in the bio, you can definitely sign up again, it's six weeks, and we will be meeting every Monday evening for an hour. And I can't not wait to have you with me. Adventures In Feeding My Fam is a weekly podcast discussing the challenges and fun around feeding your family healthy meals. I'm Andrea Heyman and I've been a registered dietitian for over 25 years. So I know the importance of good nutrition. But I'm also a mom of three so I understand the challenges and humor that comes along with trying to make this happen. In this podcast, I'll share my tips, tricks and menus, but also share the stories and food prep failures that come along the way to interview guests. We'll discuss family food traditions, how to strengthen bonds around the family table, as well as their favorite family recipes. There isn't one right way to feed your family. But there are countless stories. You can take bits and pieces and learn from all of them. I think it was up So three, where I talked about my five steps for meal planning. Today, we're going to go a little bit more specific into my two to two method, which really is kind of the step that trips people up all the time. So let me back up to, to to what is this? A few months ago, I was talking to one of my friends, Wendy, and she was asking me for help, like, Andrea, how do you do this? How do you organize your meals? You always have healthy things for your family, how do you do it, and I proceeded to tell her that my biggest key was, in a week, when I'm planning meals for a week length of time, I only have two meals that are a little bit more elaborate two meals that I'm going to make during that week that are super, super easy and super, super quick. And then two meals that are kind of an average length of prep time. And so she turned around and said, Oh, two to two. So thus, the term the two to two method was born. Thank you, Wendy. And this is really where people get tripped up, they don't really know how to pick recipes, they kind of like, get stuck, and I see it over and over again, they get in this kind of paralysis, like they don't really know where to go. So we can really streamline the system. And what I want to remind folks is, is that if you plan a week long menu, you don't have to scrap that you can go through the week, make all of those recipes. And you can keep that plan for future weeks, okay, you do not have to reinvent the wheel week after week after week. And that is a really critical point that I'm going to go over. In the future as I am in the process of creating this really awesome course, that is gonna be called the monthly meal map method where I teach you how to make a month long meal plan. And use that month after month after month. So that as time goes on, your meal planning process is so quick and so efficient. I've already been working with a couple of people, and they've been giving me a lot of advice and tweaks and information about how to make this really work for them. So I think it's going to be awesome. So keep tuned, that'll be in the future. But what I have learned from those folks, is that when we go through and actually do the step of trying to find two meals that take a little bit lengthier time. So for me, those are meals, you know, I like to explore a little bit and try some new recipes and things like that. And they typically take me a little bit longer time, maybe about 40 minutes to an hour, not everybody is willing to dedicate that much time to meal prep, though. So if that doesn't fit into your life, then you know, you are going to have more recipes that fall into that middle category of about 20 to 30 minutes of meal prep. And then the third category is recipes that take about 10 minutes of prep time. So something that you have on the back burner that really takes a short short amount of time that you can just kind of whip out in a pinch. All right, in the course of a week, I want you to have two recipes that you're going to plan to make for the week that fall into each of these two categories. And we're really defining them by length of preparation time. All right, so now it's sort of like okay, Andrea, but how do I choose and where do I go. So that is where we can help each other. Let's this week, we can talk a little bit more about meals that you make that are kind of your go twos. And we can help each other determine gets more ideas generated. I'm also going to give you a link in the show notes where you can access my five recipes that are kind of my fallbacks that really takes such a short amount of time and don't really require lengthy prep time because we know we Everyone needs recipes in their back pocket like that, that they're going to use for their family. So we will continue to elaborate and talk about this together. Because the biggest challenge is actually choosing and having some ideas so sometimes it's easier for other people to just tell us Hey, my family really likes these five recipes and I think they would work for you So let's begin to share those. And I will leave that link for that in the show notes. So remember the two to two method, you don't have to be super elaborate in your meal prep every single day of the week. So if you liked this episode, please rate review and subscribe to the podcast. This is how we get the word out to other folks and continue to grow our community and share with one another's, all the good nuggets of information that we've learned together and we can help one another. Until next time, take care