Monday Hangover? Meal Planning to Get Back on Track!

Do you struggle with your meal planning? Is getting enough nutrients in your meals but not exceeding your caloric goals a huge stumbling block for you in achieving your fitness and weight loss goals?

Meal planning is really the heart and soul of all of your workout/weight loss/body transformation efforts. If you have not given the appropriate amount of attention to meal planning, you may be wasting a lot of time and effort on workouts from which you are seeing little to no results. Most people do not stick to their workout regimen because they do not see immediate results. Why? Because they have failed to put the appropriate time and effort into meal planning.

You must create a calorie deficit each day in order to lose weight. What type of weight you lose, how fast you lose it and the end result of your general health upon reaching your weight loss goals is heavily dependent upon what types of food comprise the calories you eat. However, whether you're eating chocolate all day, or lettuce, you will lose weight if you create a caloric deficit. If you don't, you will not. I will address QUALITY of nutrition in future blog posts, but for the purposes of meal planning, for now we will focus simply on creating a calorie deficit.

There are many websites, tools and methods (asking me is the easiest and fastest!) to help you to determine your base metabolism and how many calories you are burning throughout the day to determine whether you have created a deficit. But 3,500 calories is the deficit you must achieve to lose one pound. So if you've been eating three 1,000-calorie meals per day and wondering why you never lose weight, there's your answer.

For optimum weight loss, approach meal planning in this fashion: 5-6 "meals" per day, 200 to 300 calories each (depending on your sex, current weight, level of fitness and rate at which you wish to lose), eaten at 3-hour intervals. I personally schedule my meals at 7:00 am, 10:00 am, 1:00 pm, 4:00 pm and 7:00 pm. I schedule my meals around my children's school, my fitness classes and my optimum bedtime. Your efforts at meal planning will not be successful if you pick up your children from school at 2:30 pm and are supposed to be eating at 3:00 pm, for example, unless your meal planning includes protein bars that you eat on the road. Generally speaking, however, you should be striving to eat food or shakes that you prepare at home or work at a time that does not overlap with scheduled workouts, meetings or other errands so that you can pay attention and be fully present when eating.

For maximum metabolic burn rates, you should put some calories into your body within one hour of waking. Because my meal plan has my first meal of the day at 7:00 am and this is when my children are preparing for school, this meal for me is a Vi-Shake meal replacement product. I am a huge proponent of meal replacement shakes because most people skip breakfast because they do not have time to prepare a healthy option. A meal replacement shake like Visalus will not only give you the correct ratio of protein/carbohydrates and one-third of your daily vitamins and minerals, but will consist of a healthy, balanced meals for under 200 calories.

There are many who are resistant to incorporating meal replacement products into their meal planning strategy, and I typically find that they do themselves a disservice by not considering this highly effective, efficient, economic, time-saving and calorie-cutting option. People who start a "diet" instead of instituting effective meal planning as a life habit will prep their food and their menus and stick to this for about a week before they get too busy, forget to make their meals for the week, wake up late one morning and just skip breakfast altogether, and very quickly are simply back in the eating habits that created the extra weight or unhealthy habits in the first place.

The reason most people are so successful in their meal planning efforts when they commit to a 90-day Challenge is because of the ease and simplicity of fueling your body at the appropriate times with the appropriate nutrients with Vi-Shakes. This is the "secret" to successful meal planning and weight loss efforts, because instead of having to "cook" or "prepare" five to six healthy, low-calorie meals every day, you've got one or two of them already "done" for you in advance. Throw in the fact that the shakes I use taste like a cake mix and therefore eliminate my "sweet" craving, and it's pretty hard to argue against the value, efficiency, convenience and ease these products can bring to your life, especially at a cost of less than $2.00 per MEAL. It's very difficult in this economy to feed yourself high-quality nutrition for less than $2.00.

If you struggle with meal planning, creating a calorie deficit or eating every three hours, I am happy to share with you all of the tricks and hints I've learned over the years to make my meal planning simple, painless and effective. So reach out to me and ask me anything you want!! I am always happy to help!