When you are trying to lose weight, maintain a healthy weight, or reach your health goal, the hardest thing to do is to maintain your will power or constantly take the time out of your day to cook and think how your next meal will benefit or take away from those goals.
Health and fitness buffs have found the answer, meal planning! The idea is that you choose one day out of your week and plan, cook, and prepare all your meals for the week so that throughout the week you don’t have to think about anything but living your life, as all your nutrition is accounted for by your homes personal chef, you!
Determine your Daily Caloric intake!
I would say, when it comes to meal planning for weightloss, that determining your daily caloric intake is the grumbly initiation. In truth, if you’d like, meal planning can be as complicated as a math equation or as simple as just selecting the right foods!
However, once you have used an online calculator that has factored in your age, gender, height, weight, and activity level you will then know exactly how much you need to eat in a day in order to stay healthy, and exactly how much under that you should be eating if weight-loss is your goal!
Think about what you would like to eat in the coming week, but be consistent!
When you are planning your meals for the week ahead try to choose recipes that are similar, but seasoned differently for example, so that you don’t have to go shopping for all sorts of ingredients!
Perhaps for week one, as your proteins you’ll have ground turkey for lunch and chicken breast for dinner each day of the week. See? Yet, perhaps for Monday and Wednesday you have Chicken pesto for dinner while Tuesday and Thursday you have chicken in salsa.
Portion out your food to ensure that you are not over-eating!
Meal planning eliminates the idea of cooking a huge dinner one night and starving yourself the next night. Your consistency will ensure that each meal is proportioned to the amount that will make you full no more, no less!
You are able to relax during the week as each of your meals contains the right portion of fruits or veggies, carbs, and proteins that satisfy you, giving you the power over your health with none of the headache, simply go to your fridge and take out your, hopefully labeled, Tupperware container.
Don’t forget you can “snack” throughout the day!
The way to maintain a healthy metabolism is to always have “logs in the fireplace” so to speak so that you are always burning calories.
Therefore, don’t feel as though your planned meals are all you are allowed to have in the day, meal planning isn’t meant to be restrictive its meant to relieve the stress you have about putting energy into constantly having to think about what you eat!
Healthy snacks to have between meals might be almonds or walnuts, or even a piece of fruit for something sweet!
Meal planning can be what you make of it, and for many it’s a way to have power over their personal nutrition and still have time for an active lifestyle! Once you start meal planning for yourself to help you meet your weight-loss goals you might even have so much time on your hands you’ll want to meal plan for your friends and family too!
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