Meal Planning as Self-Care

Are you constantly asking yourself "What should I meal prep this week?" or "What should I make for dinner tonight?" Do you find yourself caught up in the meal planning brainstorming phase and subsequently have difficulty with following through with meal prep and having a consistent eating pattern? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ll want to read on:

Meal planning is hard, especially if it was something never modeled well growing up or taught to you. Trying to juggle all of life's demands AND feed yourself 3+ times a day!? Seems impossible. But as your friendly dietitian, having a consistent eating pattern and feeding yourself regularly is a must. Perhaps instead of face masks and bubble baths, your self-care routine could be meal planning once a week to set yourself up nicely for the next 21 meals (7 days).

Self-Care as Meal Planning

Eating consistently throughout the day is a non-negotiable part of life. Throwback to psychology class and having to learn about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The pyramid goes from bottom to top: physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem needs, and self-actualization. Food is a physiological, basic need. How do you expect yourself to climb to the top of this hierarchy if your foundation is crumbling from not eating consistently? Exactly! You deserve to eat consistently throughout the day so you can function optimally, thrive, and hopefully reach self-actualization in your lifetime.

Benefits of Eating Consistently Throughout the Day

Eating consistently throughout the day only benefits and elevates your life. Eating to function optimally means meeting your basic energy requirements. Which may look like this:

• Being able to focus more clearly on the task at hand since you’re not having to think about food.

  • Food thoughts are early signs of hunger. When you start thinking, “Ooh what’s for lunch?”, your body has already begun the hunger signal so that you can feed it something timely.

  • If you prolong hunger, all you will be thinking about is food- I know we’ve all waited hangrily for our delivery pizza and non-stop thinking about eating a hot slice.

• Having a more stable & pleasant mood as eating more consistently will prevent hangry levels of hunger and blunted hunger cues.

• Experiencing more consistent energy levels from regularly feeding your body with food. We get energy from food, which is also known as calories.

I would then define "thriving" as functioning optimally accompanied by incorporating a balance of foods that satisfy your taste buds and meal satisfaction level while having a healthy relationship with food. Reaching self-actualization is the process of "becoming everything you are capable of becoming," which you can't achieve if skipping meals and hangry 24/7. I'm just being honest, there is no way.

5 Steps to Meal Planning for Self-Care

Lucky for you I have an entire FREE minicourse on meal planning called, 5-Step Meal Planning Guide for Self-Care. The minicourse is a prerecorded video of me coaching you through creating your own meal planning system step by step. This meal planning guide can adapt to any lifestyle and changes that occur throughout your lifetime because the key to consistent meals is sustainable habits. The 5 steps are described below:

1. Make your meal plan master list

   1. In this step, we create an entire organized braindump of your current staple meals while having an easy way to incorporate new meal ideas you’d like to try without forgetting- Like me, I bet you have like 1 million saved recipes saved across 3 platforms (Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok) just waiting around to be made. This step is the key to fast meal brainstorming in the future.

2. Meal plan

   1. This step involves filling in a meal plan template that outlines your upcoming week, balancing each meal with my nutrition self-care tidbits, and tips for making your grocery list!

3. Grocery shop

   1. This step provides grocery shopping tips for ease and efficiency- We want to be in and out of the store pronto! No need to waste time.

4. Meal prep

   1. This step involves tips for batch preparing what needs to be prepped and dividing up the meals and containers. (Hint: Don't think that you need to make everything from scratch, who has time for that!?)

5. Repeat!

   1. This step is repeating your own meal planning system you created each week to develop the habit of consistent eating!

Well, what are you waiting for!? Run, don’t walk to this free meal planning resource. In about 30 minutes, you can create your entire meal planning system, including your meal plan master list, meal plan, and grocery list all ready to go for the upcoming week. Finally, know what the heck to eat/make each week so that you can be prepared, fueled, and satisfied with meals every day for self-care- It's about time you've met your basic needs! Click the hyperlink to gain access to the 5-Step Meal Planning Guide for Self-Care Minicourse!