How are you doing your meals?

Are you following the book or just making up your own following each wave?

I am curious as to which you have found is easier! Thanks!

When I first started, I did Wave 1 meal plans for 10 days because it was easy. I am still working my way through Wave 2 meal plans because it is helping to reinforce proper portion sizes and giving me new food ideas! It's taking a while, though, because we eat out a lot and have a lot of family gatherings at various family members' homes. In those cases, I select my foods using Sonoma principles and usually it's very easy.

Good luck and welcome!

Did you follow the book?

I work weird hours so its impossible for me to cook for both of us. I work during dinner time.

I'm not following anything exactly, but I am making the recipes as well as some of my own concoctions, but following portion sizes and principles. I find I am using a lot less oil - a few tsp a day of olive oil isn't very much and although I cooked generally healthy before, I would put in more olive oil than that.

I also ate a lot of fruit - a big bowl of a couple cups in the mornings. I still think this isn't a bad pattern, but I do tend to crave sugar so I'm cutting it back. I have always had a glass of wine with dinner - but for a few weeks I'm cutting that out, too.

I have entered the calories into fitday a few times and find I end up with 1400-1500 and admittedly I'm having a small treats here and there that aren't in Wave 1. I bet you'd be at 1200 if you were strict. The days I was really strict, I woke up the next morning so famished that I was miserable. I think 1500 is a much better number for me to be comfortably consistent.

I just don't want to cave and then backlash - I find I need a bit of this and that here and there and honestly once in a while you can eat anything and just quit when you are satisfied. In the end I think that's the best thing in the back of your mind - but absolutely eatiing all this great stuff most of the time is so healthy and makes me feel great.

I have the book, but I've used my own recipes the whole time I've been on the plan. It's easy to adapt your own, just keep the legal ingredients and proportions in mind. I've been sick for about 2 weeks with an upper respiratory infection and all I want when I'm sick is soup, so I've eaten *way* more soup than usual lately! What I do with soup recipes is try to proportion the ingredients the way they would be if they were separate dishes in a meal. Does that make sense? For example, for a Wave 1 soup, I'd make it 50% veggies, 25% protein, and 25% grains. Then I just eat a big bowl of it and don't worry about measuring.

The reason I'm going on so much about soup is because it's really easy to make a huge pot and freeze it in smaller portions, which I find really helpful when working weird hours.

Like Cindy, every now and then I eat something off plan; for example, last night was a friend's 50th birthday party, and I ate some things I normally wouldn't have--along with drinking a few beers--but in the scheme of things, I don't think it will do any damage to do that once or twice a month, as long as you don't go overboard with it.

Jeri

I had planned to be very strict, but found I didn't need to be. Adjusting my cooking to the plan requirements has been easy, so I'd say I'm following the meal plan about 50%.