Emotional and binge eating is a train wreck waiting to happen. It’s been a few days and things have not been going your way, you come home drained and you have no time to look after what you have been eating. You go for the easy option, the life-your-mood option, the convenient catastrophe. You may have started the week out with your willpower and level 100 and you were all set to climb the elementary school food pyramid, but somewhere mid-week, your energies tanked and your cravings soared.
How do you prevent a crisis like that? You prevent it the way you prevent all crises: a crisis management program or as we like to call it, food planning. It prevents from derailing from your objectives and gives you easy plans to fall back on. When energies run low and so does willpower, your past self has already figured out things for you. There are a few simple breadcrumbs left for you to follow your way to living the healthy, balanced lifestyle you had set out on when life was all sunshine and rainbows.
Still not convinced on why you should plan your meals to make life easy? Let us break down the possible advantages of having a go at planning your weekly food prep.
Energy
Like any of the resources that are integral to our survival, our willpower is non-renewable. We start out our days and weeks with a preset amount of willpower that gets used up rapidly in small decision-making tasks from what we should wear to what we should say. When we resort to cooking up something, we fall back on fast foods and dirty meals.
Food planning prevents you from crashing midway because you have plan A, B and Z to resort to when you cannot figure what will be healthy and happy for you to have for dinner. Planning takes off one thing of your daily to-do list, freeing up time for you to treat yourself with nothing but the best on no matter how hard the day has been going.
Portion Planning
Food planning allows you to give all the important things their rightful place in your menu. When you plan a menu beforehand, you get to choose what goes in there. Prep planning gives you the opportunity to stick to your New Year’s resolution of treating your body right and having your doctors’ recommended portion of fruits and vegetables. Even on days when you feel like putting no effort into cooking or eating whatever your first craving is, a plan reminds you of an alternate meal that you set out for yourself that will not only gratify you in the moment, but something your future self will also be grateful for.
Treat Yourself
Some days you will want to piece together any and every crumb you find to just get through the day and eat for the sake of survival. Did you know that American spend more in snacks that actual groceries? We’re building poor meals with a bunch of snacks. With a cooking plan, you get to go the extra mile and plan for yourself a meal that you know you will like. This preplanned blessing might just be the meal that turns your awful week around because you planned a dinner or lunch that was nutritious and a treat to pick you up.
The Tension
When we don’t plan and prep, the more stress we have. This is why all romantic comedies leave you with a message of going with the flow and throwing caution to the wind. With a cooking plan you get the best of both worlds, you can avoid the stress of pondering over “What for dinner?” and replace that with meals that give you zero-stress and maximum gratification and nutritional value. This means more time to do something you like. It takes longer to drive to a place buy and go home to eat than to warm up or assemble something you planned ahead. And we can all use less driving around (and spending on bad food)
Want to try this for a week? I just came up with an awesome idea. I’m hosting another “Unchallenge”! This time a it is a Love-full & Stress-less cooking plan! It will run from Sunday February 11th to 18th…Right in time for Valentine’s day. How about that for some love?
I’ll give you a suggested menu for one week and we all do it together. This will be a social media based challenge with daily mini tasks and suggestions but you can join even if you are not on facebook and instagram. However if you join and post often tagging me and the challenge you can win a full month of suggested meal prep including the grocery list. Can I get a kale yeah!
If you are as excited as I am about this idea, join and invite some friends along. You know what I like to say “Together is better”
Are you ready to love planning your food prep?
XO
Coach Maria Marcano
This article is well meaning but sugar is as addicting as cocaine for goodness sake. It’s only in recent human history that sugar is in our diet the way it is today. It affects the same receptors in the brain as cocaine, gives the same high and crash as cocaine and is just as addictive. So while meal planning is absolutely important, most people need to look at sugar as an addiction and deal with it on those terms. It doesn’t help there’s 10 establishments on one city block that sell sugar in one way or another. Health Canada did a public awareness campaign against smoking and now it’s virtually non-existent. They need to do the same with sugar. Yes companies will hate it, but they’ll just have to adjust and make healthier products. It can happen. We need to look at binging as individuals, but also systemically.