Weekly meal planning
 

So I am back on here after quite awhile. I weigh more than ever. I haven't stepped on a scale in a few weeks but last time I had I was at 218. I have a horrible relationship with food. To the point that I always feel like I have to "keep eating" just because other people do. I just don't know when to stop. I'll eat just because it tastes good, not because I am hungry.

Soooo back to the title of this forum, I want to try weekly meal planning to help keep me in proportions. Have any of you guys tried this?
I've tried prepping daily for work and what not and it has worked. Eventually though something happens and I slide off the path.
Any tips? Maybe we can help each other stay on track and share recipes?

I definitely plan my menus weekly, not just because it helps me stick to a good healthy meal plan, but also because it helps me budget my food expenses, as I'm on a tight budget right now. I've never strayed from the actual weekly planning, as I'm a total planner, so I don't know that I have really any tips for you. One thing I do do is that I print out my menus and put the daily menu on the refrigerator so that I see it in front of me. That helps me see it visually so I can stick to it.

Tam

Weekly meal planning helped my family a lot. It mostly helped me lay out a plan so that I wasn't wracking my brain trying to figure out what to make for dinner every night.

But when I was a binger meal planning did not help at all. In fact it made my binging worse. My biggest trigger for binging is restriction and a meal plan is a pretty rigid restriction. I would plan for a nice salad and grilled chicken and then end up at burger king. I still use our meal plan template but only to figure out what we WANT to eat rather than what we SHOULD eat. I'm not a binger anymore by the way.

My family is scattered throughout the day so we eat all our meals separately, but at dinner time we come together and this is our dinner meal template. It helps me out a lot in structuring our meals. For example on seafood night we could eat fish or we could have linguine a vongole, or we could have tuna sandwiches or whatever else involves seafood.

Monday - Vegetarian
Tuesday - Seafood
Wednesday - Salad night (we each get a big bowl of greens and throw in whatever ingredients we each like)
Thursday - Soup or stew night
Friday - Italian night (pizza, pasta, lasagna, risotto etc)
Saturday - Wild card
Sunday - Long cooking day (anything that takes a long time to prepare and/or cook like a slow roast or casserole)

I plan my all my meals for the week over the weekend. I usually add new recipes on fridays. Go shopping on Saturdays and cook it on Sundays.

Although yesterday after some marathon cooking I may spread that out a bit more.

I don't plan for the week...but I try to keep things simple as possible. For meals, I'll allow myself one plate of food and nothing more. It is something that seems reasonable and when I did OA, it was something my sponsor recommended. That doesn't mean the food is piled high on the plate. ;)

For me, it also helps to count calories, as tedious as it feels sometimes. I give myself a range these days, rather than a strict number. I keep it between 1200-1700 calories a day. Around my period, I'll have more because my body just craves more and if I try to stick to a low number of calories, it makes me feel deprived and is more likely to lead to binges.

I think you should keep trying and see if planning works for you, since you never know what will be the best way for your life.

I keep telling myself I'm going to pin up 5 breakfast, lunch, and dinner ideas on my fridge when I'm at as loss of what to prepare... Still haven't.

Planning certainly helps me, when I stick to it. My routines are much different now while I’m home for summer vacation…

When I am working, it also helps that for Mon-Fri, I usually have the same breakfast and lunch. I eat both of those meals at work, so I needed things that I could pack quickly and buy in bulk without going to waste. Cold cuts and bread sometimes spoiled if I didn’t use them quickly or package them correctly. I switched to greek yogurt and cereal for breakfast and a meal replacement shake for lunch. I’ll also bring in some fruit, and I keep individually wrapped snacks in my desk. That way, I just really have to worry about planning what I’ll eat for dinner and on the weekends.

I don’t track my calories for the whole week, but I’ll usually do that each night, for the next day. I also make sure that what I plan on taking to work the next day is on the top shelf in my fridge the night before. There were many days where I’d forget to grab the fruit if I didn’t put it by the yogurt! I also pack up five servings of my cereal on Sunday night. Sometimes I take all five with me on Monday and keep it at work…again, if it wasn’t with the fruit and yogurt it sometimes is just forgotten!

Hi Skinnygirldreams!

I have been doing food prep for the last 2 years, and I love it! It has helped with my binge eating (partially), but I have also incorporated stress reduction techniques and food substitutions (chewing gum, a glass of soda) which have helped lower my urge to binge.

The cooking does take some time, but it's worth it to just grab-n'-go throughout the week! Also, when my fridge is full, I'm not tempted to eat fast food.

One tip - make sure you have enough plastic containers. I've noticed that if i use the larger storage containers, I don't properly portion the food out onto the plate and end up running out of food. It might look like you're prepping for an army, but pre-portioning out my meals for the week really helped me stick to the plan.

Here are some recipes that I like:

Breakfasts
Burritos - egg, ham, spinach, tomato and cheese
Yogurt & frozen fruit
Fruit smoothies

Lunches
Sandwiches
Crockpot anything! - Beef stew, Chicken and veggies, Pork stir fry
BLT wraps with avocado rather than mayo
Fried rice

Dinners
Grilled chicken, rice, and veggies
Crockpot anything! :)



Good luck with the food prep! It was overwhelming at first, so I started only prepping lunches but made sure that I ate breakfast! I always ALWAYS find myself overeating or snacking at night on the days I skip breakfast.

I see you posted earlier in the month - have you started food prep yet? Let us know how it's going!!

:coffee:

I make a Saturday-Friday shopping list and print it out Friday night go shopping on Saturday morning and I have all my dinners planned out and what I need for snacks and breakfast and lunches me and my boyfriend always eat leftovers from the night befores dinner. I found myself spending WAY less money! And I track all of my next weeks days on Friday aswell

I like to cook and freeze dishes. To start, pick a one pot meal - stew, chili, curries, or soup (easiest to get the hang of) - cook, cool, portion into individual containers, and freeze. Sauces like marinara, enchilada sauce, or BBQ sauce can be frozen the same way.

You can also freeze things like meatballs, homemade burritos, breakfast sandwiches, nuggets, taquitos, mini-pot pies, stuffed peppers, or mini-meatloves by cooking, cooling, freezing on a baking sheet (flash freeze) then transferring the frozen items into a freezer bag. The baking sheet keeps them from freezing together so you can take out as many or as few as you want to eat at that time.

Casseroles can be frozen for a few hours until semi solid, then cut into portions and you can put the portioned squares into a freezer bag to take out one serving at a time.

Batch/freezer cooking has been my savior. details here. I've done it for about 8 years and I'll never look back. I cook VERY rarely during the week. Occasionally I cook something that isn't freezer friendly - like stuffed zucchini boats - at night after eating dinner so that we can just pop it in the oven the following day.

You can also prep crockpot meals at one time so that you can easily throw them into a crockpot in the morning with no prep like this.

I pretty much make a breakfast frittata/crustless quiche and keep it in the fridge to heat up one piece every morning, then I grab one of my frozen portions of food and I pack it in my lunch bag. Sometimes I make a salad or grab something leftover instead, but at least 3 out of 5 workdays are usually something from my freezer.

We use components of freezer meals (like making pita pizzas with marinara that was pre-cooked), or having zoodles or pasta with meatballs (precooked), or cooking rice to go along with dal (precooked), or putting toppings on chili (precooked), etc so that dinners are easy. I admit that now that I'm no longer a single mother, we tend to eat more meat plus veg (and sometimes starch) meals.