012 - 3 Tips for Making a Healthy Choice at Any Restaurant

Hi friends! In today’s episode, we are keeping with the healthy eating theme we’ve had going for the last few episodes and talking about how to make healthy choices when you’re dining out! 

Obviously, the healthiest choice is usually to cook your meals at home where you have more control over what ingredients are included, but it’s not possible to ALWAYS eat at home. Sometimes your schedule demands that you dine out and sometimes you just want to, which is great! I don’t know about you but I absolutely love the thought of someone else preparing my food, bringing it to me, and then cleaning up the mess, (Yes, please!) but sometimes when you’re trying to make changes to your health and be intentional about the food you’re eating, going to a restaurant can be a bit of a challenge. It’s difficult to know what ingredients are in each entree and it can be easy to feel like there aren’t healthy options, but usually, that isn’t the case!  

Today, I want to give you three easy tips for choosing a healthy option so you can enjoy your restaurant experience and not spend an hour staring at the menu! 

Now, before I get into the tips, let me just say this - you won’t always do these things. I won’t always do these things! Not every single meal has to be the healthiest choice. Sometimes, you want the splurge! Sometimes it’s cheeseburger night - go. for. it! Don’t take these tips as me saying that if you’re going to be healthy, you have to eat perfectly 100% of the time! It’s also important to note that obsessing and stressing over our food decisions is just as unhealthy as eating processed, junk foods - so we don’t want to find ourselves doing that!

When we fuel our bodies well the majority of the time and take the time to learn how what we eat affects us, we then have the freedom to go a little wild now and then! No, it wouldn’t be good to do that all the time or even every day, but every once and a while, it is totally fine! Our bodies have the ability to turn less than perfect food into energy and nutrients that we need when we are taking care of them and nourishing them the majority of the time.  

Okay, now that we cleared that up and you guys don’t think I’m some kind of kill-joy, :) let’s get into these tips! 

• Look at the menu before you go!

This can be really helpful if you know where you are going to be eating beforehand. It can feel overwhelming to get to a restaurant, especially with a group of friends or even on a date, and feel like you can’t talk to anyone for the first 15 minutes because you are intensely reading the menu. Most restaurants have their menus posted online, so it's so much easier to take time before you go to read over the menu and choose a couple of options that will be good for you and sound delicious! 

• Think about balance!

Eating a balance of carbs, protein, and fat with each meal is so important for properly fueling the body as well as maintaining stable blood sugar levels. This will keep you from having an energy crash as soon as you finish eating and will keep you full longer. When looking at the menu, choose entrees that include all three macronutrients. If the entree you want doesn’t have all three, you can always customize or add something to your order. Also, remember that things like salad dressings or other toppings (usually fats) will count towards having a balanced meal. 

Let me give you a couple of quick examples to make this a little more practical:

Instead of getting the normal cheeseburger and fries, to make it a healthier, more balanced choice, you could do a burger bowl or salad. Skip the bun and ask for your burger to be on a bed of greens, and then add all the toppings you want like onions, mushrooms, tomato, pickles, avocado, and sauces. Then have your fries on the side. By doing this you have a good mixture of fiber-rich veggies and other more starchy carbs, protein and some fat from the burger patty, and fat from the avocado and maybe from the sauces.

Another common entree option you can find almost anywhere is grilled chicken. You could do grilled chicken with rice and either a salad or other green veggie, but you will need to add in some fat. So again, avocado is a great choice or ask for some real butter or olive oil to drizzle on your veggies.  

• Get some greens in there, if nothing else!

We’ve talked about this before but the majority of us come nowhere near eating the amount of fiber we need in a day. An easy way to fix this is to add some leafy greens or other high-fiber veggies to every meal. Even if the entree you choose isn’t the healthiest, you can not only get a nutrient boost from adding on some spinach or broccoli, but also the fiber will help your body digest and process your meal more easily. 

• Bonus tip - get water! 

Unless you are specifically going to a restaurant for a specific drink that they serve, just go with the water! It’s free and will again help your body process and digest your meal more easily than if you were to drink something sugary. Instead of giving your gut and liver something else to “work on”, so to speak, it actually supports their natural processes.  

So there you have just a few easy tips to hopefully simplify making healthier choices when you’re dining out. It doesn’t have to be hard, and as long as you aren’t eating at restaurants most days of the week, you don’t have to stress over your choices. If you are following a more restrictive or elimination-style diet for a time, restaurant food probably isn’t going to be your friend or the easiest option, but by following these tips - especially the first one about looking up the menu beforehand, it is still possible to do. 

If you find yourself dining out more than you feel like you should or you want to, go back and listen to the past few episodes about meal planning and prepping ahead. This is going to be key to eating more at home, especially when your schedule is really busy - and whose isn’t? Right?! 

Alright friends, that does it for today’s episode! As a reminder, you can find my healthy eating resources, like my Meal Planning Guide, Meal Prep info, or my Healthy Kitchen Swaps Makeover Guide by clicking here. 

011 - Meal Prepping Could Be the Key to Your Success

Friends! In today’s episode, we are talking about the benefits and methods of meal prepping!

Once again this is one of those topics where the “right way” to do something is the way that works best for you and that you will actually do! Last week we talked about how to plan our meals (if you haven’t already listened to that episode, I encourage you to check out Episode 10  first), but as much as the planning part can overwhelm people, the prepping part for sure stops a lot of people in their tracks. 

There are so many ways to do this and it can be challenging to figure out which is best for your situation. I hear a lot of questions like “how do I know how much food to make ahead?”, “Which foods will still taste good prepped in advance and which are better to prepare right before you eat them?”, “How much time does it take?” and so many more - and, don’t hate me, but a lot of the answers to these questions are “it depends…”. The answers change based on how many people are in your household, how you personally tolerate left-overs, and how much time you have to do the prep.

Today I want to just do an overview of how beneficial meal prepping can be as well as give you a few tips to help make it simple and helpful for you! 

Benefits of Meal Prepping 

So, why would someone benefit from prepping some or all of their meals in advance?

Well, one of my favorite things about it is how much time it can save throughout the week. This is especially helpful for people who work long hours or crazy shifts and know that they won’t have the energy to cook when they get home from work. It’s also great if you and your spouse work differing shifts and maybe can’t eat your meals together every night. It’s been really helpful for me because as I mentioned in the last episode, the dinner-time hours also seem to be the neediest hours for my toddler, and it keeps me from having to spend as much time in the kitchen when she is needing more of my attention. 

Another great benefit, and the one that I think is key for most people, is that prepping your meals ahead helps you stick to your healthy eating goals. This is so important, especially when you are trying to make changes to your health. Let’s be real, the temptation to grab take-out or swing through the drive-thru on your way home is high - especially after a long or stressful day; however, that temptation will be so much lower if you know that there is a delicious home-cooked meal that you love waiting for you at home and one that you’ve already put work and effort into. You’re not going to want to waste that effort! 

This is one of the keys to success for my clients. Not only does it help them to fuel their bodies well, but it helps to also change their habits and gives them the confidence they need to cook more at home. So now they are both making healthier decisions and saving money by not eating out as much! Win-win!

Methods for Meal Prepping 

As I mentioned before there are different methods for prepping your meals ahead. I personally have used two different methods that I go back and forth with depending on how much prep time I have. 

The first method is what I call the “big prep”. I use this method when I have a little more time, maybe on Saturdays or during one of my daughter’s nap-times throughout the week. I got the idea from the book “Cook Once Eat All Week” by Cassy Joy Garcia and it usually takes around 1.5 hours, maybe 2 if I have more interruptions. But essentially, I will prep most all ingredients for 3-4 dinners, plus a few breakfast or lunch items if I have time. In the book, Cassy teaches you exactly how to do “prep day” - which items to prep first, in what order things should go into the oven, etc. in order to make the most of your time and your space. I highly suggest this book if you are new to the process of meal prepping or if you would like to learn a new method. She includes recipes for 26 weeks worth of healthy meals, and even if you don’t use her recipes, and use your meal plan instead, you can still apply her principles of meal prepping to save yourself time. 

The second method is my “mini-prep”, which is what I default to a lot, especially if I haven’t had a chance to spend a couple of hours in the kitchen. Using this method, I just try to prep 1-2 extra things when I am cooking dinner on Sunday or Monday evening. Simple things like browning ground beef or pre-chopping veggies for other meals can save you so much time later in the week. I’m already in the kitchen and in cooking mode, so while I wait for the oven to preheat or for water to boil or something, I just prep an ingredient for another meal. Also, a lot of times you put what you’re having for dinner in the oven to cook for 20-30 min and instead of going and doing something else with that time, on those nights, I just prep for other meals. Another reason I like this method is I don’t know about you, but I start most weeks with pretty high motivations and good intentions, but by  Wednesday or Thursday night, I’m tired and that motivation has usually decreased significantly. 

Even just prepping your lunches for the week while you are cooking dinner one night will keep you from being tempted to eat out for lunch every day! 

Simple Meal Prepping Tips 

Here are a few tips that can help you with your meal prep, no matter which method you choose:

• In order to have a game-plan for what to prep, you will need to have your meals planned out. It’s hard to prep meals ahead when you don’t even know what those meals are. You can grab my free meal planning guide here, or over on Instagram if you need some help with planning your meals. 

• I highly recommend that you do your grocery shopping and you’re meal prepping on different days. Now, I will say that this is dependent on your personality and the amount of time you have, so you can experiment with it and see how it goes. Personally, it stresses me out too much to try to do both on the same day. I do like to wash my produce and maybe do a little pre-chopping or something when I’m putting groceries away, but actually cooking a bunch of meals right after I come home from the store and having to put all the groceries away is just more time than I want to spend in the kitchen at one time

• Along those same lines, I recommend that start your prep with a clean kitchen. It doesn’t have to be spotless, but at least have mostly cleared off counters and an empty sink. Believe me, it is not an enjoyable experience to try to chop, mix, and cook when you’re working with about 6 inches of clean counter space or if a pile of dirty dishes is staring at you from the sink (ask me how I know :)). You want the process of meal prepping to be as enjoyable and stress-free as possible, so do yourself a favor and clean your kitchen up a bit before you start your meal prep and turn on some fun music (or maybe your favorite podcast {wink, wink}) while you’re at it. 

• As far as storing the food you prep, you can store it in a few different ways. One way is to store in the fridge in the pot that you used to cook it in. This is really helpful for when you’ve made soup or something large that you will need to reheat before you have it as a meal. It couldn’t be more simple than that, just take it out of the fridge an hour or so before you’re going to need to heat it, and then just put it on the stove or in the oven to reheat! Then for smaller dishes or if I’m going to divide a certain ingredient up to use in multiple meals, I will use my glass food storage. When it comes to storing food or anything that is going to be going into your body, it’s better to use glass or stainless steel than plastic. Even BPA free plastic still has many other kinds of estrogen-like chemicals in them that can easily leach into the food, especially when the plastic is heated. So, if you don’t have glass containers, use what you’ve got but please don’t heat your food in the microwave in plastic containers - move over to a ceramic or glass bowl or plate before you eat it.  These chemicals do a number of things in our bodies, including increasing the overall toxic load on our livers, but increased usage of them can lead to hormone imbalance, in both men and women.

• The last tip is also going to be one of preference, but personally, I wouldn’t prep more than 3-4 days of food at a time unless it’s something that you’ve prepped before and you know will stay good for the entire week. Chopped raw veggies or hard-boiled eggs are great examples of things that should last the whole week, but some cooked veggies will become mushy and some meats will become dried out when left in the fridge over a few days. This may take a little trial and error to figure out, but as a general rule, I stick to about 4 days for cooked meals. 

Friends, I hope you found a few tips helpful and were able to see that meal prepping can be done in many different ways and how it can be key to helping you stick to your healthy eating goals! 

As always, if you have any questions about the episode, feel free to reach out! Have a wonderful rest of your week and I’ll see you back here next week!

010 - How I Meal Plan for My Family

Hi friends! Today we are going to be talking all about meal planning and specifically how I meal plan. There is no one way or “right” way to do meal planning or grocery shopping, but this is a topic that I am asked about a lot and I think it can seem overwhelming if you’ve never done it before. So, I’m going to share with you my process and what I have found best to work for me at this stage in our lives. Just remember that if this isn’t the best method for your life, that’s okay! We can still all learn from each other’s tips and methods.

So let’s just get real for a minute before we jump into the details...

Sometimes the idea of having to sit down and meal plan feels like a pain - there are days I just straight up don’t want to do it -  but do you know what is more of a pain than taking the time to meal plan? The stress of trying to decide what is for dinner every evening right around 4-5 pm, which also happens to be when my toddler seems to have the most meltdowns; or going way over budget at the grocery store, and then getting to come home and tell my husband that I spent the entire month’s grocery budget in this one trip because I didn’t go in with a plan. The truth is that this is something that I have learned from experience! I have found my life to be so much easier if I just make the decision and commit myself to make a meal plan for our family.  

Now like I said, there is no ONE way to meal plan, but I think there are a couple of universal tips that I think can be helpful for anyone no matter what method you use:

• Get organized! 

Set a specific time every week or two to devote to planning your meals. Make it a fun thing if you need to - a coffee date by yourself! Yes, please!

• Have a flexible plan!

  One of the most frustrating parts of meal planning can be when you set this really beautifully laid out plan and then something happens and throws the whole thing out the door! Most likely your week will not go exactly as you planned it but you are still going to benefit from working off of a plan rather than completely winging it.

My Meal Planning Process

When I’m making our meal plan, the first thing I do is sit down with a pen, paper, and my calendar (yes, I like to physically write it out - but that’s just me). I plan our meals two weeks at a time - so I list out the dates for the next two weeks and make a note of any nights that we won’t be home or we know that we will be eating out. I also make a note if there is a night that maybe only one of us will be home for dinner or a date night for us, which would mean that I will only need to make dinner for our daughter. This lets me know exactly how many dinners I will need to plan. 

Next, I usually go to my Pinterest boards or scan through a few of my favorite cookbooks as well as any recipes I’ve saved on my phone that I wanted to try out (I love to just take a screenshot of recipes or meal ideas I come across online). While there are usually a few staple meals that we have every two weeks, I like to change things up and not eat the same things all the time. 

I have a few criteria that I look for when I’m looking for new meal ideas for our family:

• Is it something that will be nourishing for us?

• Are the main ingredients something that both my husband and I like? 

• Is it too complicated or does it have too many ingredients?

• Can I get it on the table in less than 30 minutes? If not, can parts of the meal be prepped ahead?

So I encourage you to think through what your criteria may be - especially if you’re not familiar with trying new recipes or cooking at home a lot. You don’t want to choose a bunch of recipes that will overwhelm or frustrate you! As you cook more, you will get more adventurous!

Once I’ve chosen my meals for those two weeks, I will go through and note any ingredients I will need to buy and get started on my grocery list. 

My Grocery List 

I like to organize my grocery list by the way the store is laid out. It just helps my brain not to feel too overwhelmed and helps me to not be as likely to forget things. I add all the ingredients I need for my chosen meals, plus any staples items we may need for breakfasts or snacks. 

There are several different methods of buying groceries. Some people prefer to go into the store and shop themselves and some choose to order their groceries online and either pick them up or have them delivered. 

Last week I asked in my Insta Stories for some of your tips for buying healthy meals and staying in budget, and you guys had great ideas! A few of the ideas were things like shopping at multiple grocery stores - which is something I also personally do; stocking up on whatever organic meat is on sale that week and cutting and freezing it for future meals - which is such a smart idea; sticking to your meal plan and only going to the store one per week or two (if you shop bi-weekly) - this is a great tip because I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but every time you need to stop at the store for one little thing, you always walk about with 5-6 little things because they were on sale or because it was a new product; someone else mentioned going in with some other people on a CSA or maybe a cow-share, which can be a little expensive on the front-end but really save you some money over time, plus it gives you a chance to get to know the farm where you are getting your food from, which is pretty cool!

So you just need to decide which method is best for you, whether you want the convenience of buying everything from one store or if you are trying to be more budget-conscious, shopping in multiple stores!  You are the expert on your family! 

Personally, having a plan and walking into the store with a list not only helps me to feel more organized but it also helps me stay on budget (well.. mostly 😏), minimize food waste and just gives me the assurance of knowing that I’m feeding my family healthy, nourishing meals. That’s an invaluable benefit to me! 

I have designed a freebie Meal Planning Guide for you that covers everything I’ve talked about today but also includes a downloadable blank template for you to use to make your own meal plan and grocery list! The guide also includes a link to my exact meal plan and grocery list from two weeks ago! I know sometimes it’s just fun to see what meals other people make and what they buy at the store, so I’ve included that as a little bonus!

I hope this guide will give you a little inspiration and encourage you to make the process of meal planning work for your family! 

Don’t forget that you can always follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for more helpful tips for healthy meals and meal planning! If you feel like you need more personalized support I also offer a specific Meal Planning and Prepping Coaching Call! It’s a 75-min virtual session where we work on your specific obstacles with meal planning and prepping your meals ahead of time. 

I hope you enjoy the rest of your week and I’ll see you next time!