How Do I meal Plan?
When I think about the many nutrition questions that I have been asked over the years as a Wellness Coach and Personal Trainer, meal planning and prepping has to be one of the most common topics:
“How do I Meal Plan/Prep?”
“How do I decide how much food to put in each meal?”
“When should I eat throughout the day?”
These questions were once stressful for me because they brought up a lot of questions. There was also confronting the knowledge that I just plain did not know how to do some of these things. There were basic barriers such as not knowing how to cook the food I wanted to prepare, or not having the kitchen hardware for recipes I had never tried before. One can learn how to overcome these barriers by simple trial and error. But my hope is that this blog post can help answer some basic questions, and make Meal Planning and Prep much more approachable.
The first place I like to start if you want to begin with Meal Planning, is to establish what the goal of your nutrition plan is. You could be prepping for a Half-Marathon, while taking on a project at work. You could be preparing to compete in a powerlifting competition, while working on settling into a new desk job.
Supporting your body with quality fuel, so that it has the nutrients required to excel at the things you are taking on requires a specific catering to what your life looks like. To me, you would have completed this step, if you have reached some sort of daily caloric intake, or daily macronutrient guideline that you know supports your expenditure, and recovering from it. For those who are familiar with calories, and not macronutrients; there are 3 macronutrients that make up the food that we intake:
Carbohydrates
Protein
Fat
Once you have completed the step of laying out a daily intake goal, the next step is to plan out timing of intake, or when you will eat throughout the day. Timing, if we look at science, is all about consistency. This consistency in spacing/timing of intake is all about supporting a consistent metabolic rate. As stated in the study cited below, there are many factors like genetics, energy expenditure, and environment that affect someone's metabolic rate (Pettersen, 2018). Many of these factors cannot be controlled or changed. However, frequency, quality, and quantity of caloric intake IS a controllable factor. Keeping these factors consistent will go a long way to supporting a consistent metabolic rate! This will be important to bringing the same focus and intention to all of your endeavors throughout a day regardless of where in the schedule they fall!
Once we understand the importance of consistency in timing of intake, finalizing approximate eating windows is about maintaining as even spacing as possible, while accounting for REAL barriers. If you will be in the car from 4-5pm everyday, then it might not be the best time to plan food, even if it would be the ideal time in a plan. That meal may have to come from 5-6pm. If you have to leave the house by 8am, then 8:30am is not a very beneficial time to regularly plan breakfast.
Once you have a specific idea of the quantity of food/quality of food you want to intake in a day to support yourself, and you have identified an ideal but executable timing plan, it is time for the final step. To evenly distribute your caloric/macronutrient goals over the total number of intake windows throughout the day. For example, if you decided your goal is 1,800 calories/day and you are going to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then each meal would be approximately 600 calories. This super simplifies things, especially if you are working with macronutrients instead of calories. However, it outlines the idea of the exercise.
A final little tip from here is to actually identify foods that help you achieve your intake goals in your planned eating windows. Once you have identified some of these foods that you like, I would encourage you to find 5 recipes to start that use these foods, and are storable as prepped food. Starting with just 5 allows you to practice, and repeat the recipe so that you can make it well, and efficiently! It also gives you a large enough repertoire to help avoid burnout on any 1 recipe as you are developing them!
One thing I have always kept in mind with this approach is that we are all individuals. What works for one person, may not work for another. That being said, the starting point you create for yourself with this exercise will put YOU in control of the variables. You will have created consistency in nutrition, from which you can adjust one variable at a time, and understand how it impacts the system as a whole. So many people adjust many things with their nutrition at once, and it makes it challenging to understand what variable led to the change experienced. Through starting at a control point, and adjusting one variable at a time, you can hone the feedback from the system to understand how each variable affects your health and wellness. As you compile this system of feedback, you will develop the ability to make healthy and well choices based on experience, not just what someone tells you is healthy for you.
Sources:
Amanda K. Pettersen, Dustin J. Marshall, Craig R. White; Understanding variation in metabolic rate. J Exp Biol 1 January 2018; 221 (1): jeb166876. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.166876
