Meal Planning and Prep: Should We or Shouldn’t We?
Can you remember a time when you tried a new diet plan?
Perhaps it went something like this: make a firm resolution to only eat “healthy” food from here on out. Have only home cooked, whole foods, for example (and I’m sure part of the plan was “not too much”). The plan would be followed by the purchases. Maybe there was a trip to the health food store where only organic, “clean” foods were purchased. You may have bought dried beans and grains you’d never heard of, let alone knew how to prepare. You may have bought vegetables from foreign lands, special tinctures with supposed healing properties, and dried something or others to be liberally sprinkled on each meal. You may have spent half your paycheck to order special food delivered for your plan. Or maybe you got up 3 hours early on Sundays to prepare the items needed to ensure you ate “the right way” at all times during the week.
Some time into this plan, not only were you starving and unsatisfied, you were also broke and sleep-deprived from all the planning and preparing in order to eat in your new way. Then one day, you came to your senses and decided diets suck and all of this is unsustainable.
When we do this work of divorcing from diet culture, and let go of a plan to change our weight and shape, many of us let go of planning all together. It seems that if over planning and rigid rules were our problem, then it would be best to have no plan and fly by the seat of our pants into freedom from diets.
Our new scenario might look something like this: don’t go to the grocery store for weeks, never give thought to your next meal and or eat whatever and whenever the Universe presents some food. This can be fun sometimes, but you’ll likely walk around ravenous much of the time and in such a low blood sugar daze, it will be difficult to make intentional choices when you ARE presented with the chance to eat.
As with many things, including meal planning and prep, intentional prioritization and flexibility are key.
Intentionally Prioritizing Meal Planning and Prep
Toward the beginning of my career I worked at an eating disorder treatment center. After having been in treatment a while, many patients began to understand the importance of prioritizing eating. Eating enough food on a regular basis became a person’s biggest defense against a relapse into disordered eating. (This is true of ALL eating disorders, BTW, binge eating disorder included. They are all disorders of restriction.) But then, when we discussed the priorities of going to the grocery store and spending time prepping food, these were often placed way below things like work, school, and friends.
Many patients who didn’t have experience competently feeding themselves, didn’t understand that planning and prep went hand in hand with nourishing regularly.
I invite you to work meal planning and prep into your calendar on a regular basis. Some might choose to shop regularly once or twice a week. Some may choose to do a bit of prep when they most think it will work in their schedule. For example spending ½ hour in the mornings to make a yummy breakfast, prep lunch for work, and look in the fridge to begin to conceptualize dinner. Don’t forget to plan snacks. Often this can be shopping for a variety of different, delicious snacks and keeping them on hand in your car or desk or even in a bowl in the fridge.
Flexibility In Meal Planning and Prep
How can we prioritize going to the grocery store and time in the kitchen, without falling into over planning and rigid rules? I invite you to bring your own answer to this question, as your ideas will most likely be ones that will work for you. But to get you started, here are a few things that work well for my clients in practicing flexibility with meal planning and prep.
GIVE YOURSELF OPTIONS Provide yourself with flexibility by shopping for a variety of meal components. Then mix and match them. For example, you might choose to have lettuce and dressing for salads and yummy bread and butter on hand. These can be paired with anything from pasta to chicken tenders to make a more rounded out, satisfying meal.
HAVE PLANS A, B, AND C Provide yourself flexibility when planning by having a number of different choices available for any given meal. For example, you could have 3 breakfast ideas. Plan A: “When I have no time I’ll microwave this and eat it in the car.” Plan B: “When I have very little time, this takes 2 min to prep and I can eat it at the table.” Plan C: “When I have more time, I’ll spend 10 min on prep and enjoy a more leisurely breakfast.” The key here is to have on hand all the grocery items needed for all 3 breakfasts so you’re never boxed into a corner.
PLAN FOR LOW ENERGY DAYS Lower the bar on what “counts” as a nourishing meal. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat frozen meals, grab take out on a regular basis, keep a pizza in the freezer, or other ideas for those days when you have to work late, you’re not feeling well, or you otherwise need a break from food prep. For many folks in this stress-filled society, low energy days are like at least half the days. Others may go through seasons where every day is a low energy day. That’s OK! You can still nourish yourself competently during these times.
USE A COOKBOOK DIFFERENTLY When in our over planning diet mind we may have gotten a new “healthy” cookbook and obsessively set-out to make the recipes perfectly. Let’s use cookbooks (and cooking websites) differently. How about as an inspiration? Kind of like glancing through a coffee table art book for fun, a cookbook can be used to remind us to delight in food. It can also give us ideas of ways to spice things up or pair foods in ways we hadn’t previously considered. You may even be inspired to try a new recipe or two.
CONSIDER YOUR FEELINGS AND CRAVINGS Allow yourself to change plans easily and often. Listen to your body, it’s feelings and cravings. Self-care is complicated and it requires the ability to pivot. Honor your body! Plan your meals in pencil and carry a big eraser.
Caring for ourselves with meal planning and prep is not easy. A mental block can pop up when we consider letting go of rigid rules and not falling into the “I don’t give a hoot” plan. How can we find a middle ground?