Day 1 Meal Planning...if you are struggling you can see how I tackled it!
katiekoonuh
Posts: 24 Member
Day 1 of meal planning...
I started to try and put things together myself and quickly decided that was too much change, too quickly. So, I visited the Zone Diet recipe website .
I decided to handle breakfast last and will fill in any gaps there when everything else is taken care of. So…for lunch. I found an easy recipe for Chicken & Brocoli Casserole that will make 6 servings. Because I know from Nate’s lecture that 1 block has roughly 91 calories (on average), I can tell that the 352 serving will be roughly 3.8 blocks. My lunch block is 4, so I will call that good. That tells me that there are 24 blocks in the casserole (6x4), so if Kuna wanted to use this for his 5 block lunch, we would just divide it up into Tupperware differently.
Next, I entered the recipe into MFP. It took me a minute to get the hang of it, but I quickly got faster. After I saved my recipe, I went into my food diary and selected the Chicken & Broccoli Casserole for lunch every day this week (Mon-Fri). It will be boring to have the same thing every day, but I need to get a few weeks of successful planning under my belt before I feel confident enough to mix things up. Because the ingredient selections I made were apparently different than what the recipe used to calculate, it came out as 302 in MFP for me. I’m not going to stress about it. That doesn’t quite use all of my 364 lunch calorie suggestion, so I know that I can play with some more calorically dense things later (like maybe eggs for breakfast!).
Next…dinner. I did notice that a lot of their recipes are for 2 serving sizes…again, maybe in a week or two I will feel bold enough to make our dinner that night, instead of ahead of time. For this week, I am going to do the same thing I did for lunch, and find something I can prep today. I landed on the Chicken & Vegetable Chili that makes 6 servings. This time, it didn’t have a Nutrition tab that told me how many calories it would be. No worries, I know it will calculate after I enter it as a recipe in MFP. After I finished doing that, I added it to dinner for every night this week. It ended up being 343 calories, which again, translates to roughly a 4 block meal! Yay! The math is working!
Next, for a couple snacks. I wasn’t loving the options in the Zone website, and I’m impatient. And, a snack seemed like it would be a lot simpler to just throw together. So, I just did a google search for “1 block snack”…
1. 1 hard boiled egg, ½ apple or pear, 3 almonds (was this the example Nate gave?)
2. ½ Atkins bar (lazy man’s snack…and my chocolate sanity check)
3. 1.5oz deli turkey, ½ sliced apple and ½ tsp of peanut butter
I decided to create a recipe for each of these so that I wouldn’t have to click on each ingredient to enter them into MFP. I named them similarly so that they will all be together in my list of recipes. Ex: “Snack: Egg/Apple/Almond”. They were a little higher in calories than I had hoped, but because my lunch and dinner were slightly under, and I know that I am being measured at the daily total, it works out! Then I added all 3 of them as a snack for every day this week.
I now have 353 calories left to play with. I am a little over on carbs, so will hold back on that as I build my breakfast. I’m going to go for my standard 2 eggs and slice of bacon. Added it for each day in MFP.
For a daily total, that puts me 170 calories under my daily suggestion (which is crazy considering how much food this feels like). I am close on my macro breakouts. I’ll admit, I initially stressed out when I saw that I was over on sodium and carbs, and under on protein. But I was able to talk myself off the ledge. #1, it is going to be REALLY hard to land exactly on those numbers, so I have to get used to seeing red & green on my dashboard. And, #2, considering I threw this together in a few minutes because I didn’t plan well…it’s not that bad! Tonight I will find some protein dense options so that if I am REALLY hungry, I can fill up those remaining 170 calories and reach my protein goal.
I plan to use the next week to be a little more thoughtful about searching out different recipes that look promising, putting them in the tool and then seeing how they match up together. And you better believe I will spend some time mapping out a dinner on Saturday that includes a Blue Moon!
Now I have all my food for the week in MFP, which creates some accountability (and surprisingly some confidence)…all I have to do is follow the plan. And, I have my grocery list! Off to HyVee. I will probably see some of you there!
Katie
I started to try and put things together myself and quickly decided that was too much change, too quickly. So, I visited the Zone Diet recipe website .
I decided to handle breakfast last and will fill in any gaps there when everything else is taken care of. So…for lunch. I found an easy recipe for Chicken & Brocoli Casserole that will make 6 servings. Because I know from Nate’s lecture that 1 block has roughly 91 calories (on average), I can tell that the 352 serving will be roughly 3.8 blocks. My lunch block is 4, so I will call that good. That tells me that there are 24 blocks in the casserole (6x4), so if Kuna wanted to use this for his 5 block lunch, we would just divide it up into Tupperware differently.
Next, I entered the recipe into MFP. It took me a minute to get the hang of it, but I quickly got faster. After I saved my recipe, I went into my food diary and selected the Chicken & Broccoli Casserole for lunch every day this week (Mon-Fri). It will be boring to have the same thing every day, but I need to get a few weeks of successful planning under my belt before I feel confident enough to mix things up. Because the ingredient selections I made were apparently different than what the recipe used to calculate, it came out as 302 in MFP for me. I’m not going to stress about it. That doesn’t quite use all of my 364 lunch calorie suggestion, so I know that I can play with some more calorically dense things later (like maybe eggs for breakfast!).
Next…dinner. I did notice that a lot of their recipes are for 2 serving sizes…again, maybe in a week or two I will feel bold enough to make our dinner that night, instead of ahead of time. For this week, I am going to do the same thing I did for lunch, and find something I can prep today. I landed on the Chicken & Vegetable Chili that makes 6 servings. This time, it didn’t have a Nutrition tab that told me how many calories it would be. No worries, I know it will calculate after I enter it as a recipe in MFP. After I finished doing that, I added it to dinner for every night this week. It ended up being 343 calories, which again, translates to roughly a 4 block meal! Yay! The math is working!
Next, for a couple snacks. I wasn’t loving the options in the Zone website, and I’m impatient. And, a snack seemed like it would be a lot simpler to just throw together. So, I just did a google search for “1 block snack”…
1. 1 hard boiled egg, ½ apple or pear, 3 almonds (was this the example Nate gave?)
2. ½ Atkins bar (lazy man’s snack…and my chocolate sanity check)
3. 1.5oz deli turkey, ½ sliced apple and ½ tsp of peanut butter
I decided to create a recipe for each of these so that I wouldn’t have to click on each ingredient to enter them into MFP. I named them similarly so that they will all be together in my list of recipes. Ex: “Snack: Egg/Apple/Almond”. They were a little higher in calories than I had hoped, but because my lunch and dinner were slightly under, and I know that I am being measured at the daily total, it works out! Then I added all 3 of them as a snack for every day this week.
I now have 353 calories left to play with. I am a little over on carbs, so will hold back on that as I build my breakfast. I’m going to go for my standard 2 eggs and slice of bacon. Added it for each day in MFP.
For a daily total, that puts me 170 calories under my daily suggestion (which is crazy considering how much food this feels like). I am close on my macro breakouts. I’ll admit, I initially stressed out when I saw that I was over on sodium and carbs, and under on protein. But I was able to talk myself off the ledge. #1, it is going to be REALLY hard to land exactly on those numbers, so I have to get used to seeing red & green on my dashboard. And, #2, considering I threw this together in a few minutes because I didn’t plan well…it’s not that bad! Tonight I will find some protein dense options so that if I am REALLY hungry, I can fill up those remaining 170 calories and reach my protein goal.
I plan to use the next week to be a little more thoughtful about searching out different recipes that look promising, putting them in the tool and then seeing how they match up together. And you better believe I will spend some time mapping out a dinner on Saturday that includes a Blue Moon!
Now I have all my food for the week in MFP, which creates some accountability (and surprisingly some confidence)…all I have to do is follow the plan. And, I have my grocery list! Off to HyVee. I will probably see some of you there!
Katie
9
Replies
-
This is awesome. Well done!0
-
Thanks Katie!0
-
So do you do a separate "menu" then for your kids? This I can already tell will be my biggest struggle - cooking for others too.0
-
Zoe has requested "special meals" while she is here. I am figuring out the rest of my meals based on those. I will not be prevented from sharing special dinners with my family. Also, my kids will eat their normal breakfast and lunch. For dinner I try to pick really simple things that can be combined to make it work for everyone. For example tonight we had baked chicken, noodles (only a 1/4 cup for me), and peas. I added in some extra sweet potatoe (baked it at the same time as the chicken) and raw peppers for me. Everyone seemed happy. P.s. while my chicken cooked, I also baked eggs for the week (like boiled) which everyone eats3
-
Hey guys! Clark caught me at Viral and had a good question...how do I know that the macros will work out in my recipes? Well, since I am pulling the recipes from the Zone website, I am trusting that anything they have on there is a solid balance of macros (so far that has been true). I also knew that based on my calorie suggestion, I couldn't choose calorically dense proteins for all meals, so started with a safe bet...chicken. As I mentioned above, I'm going to spend this week pre-programming some recipes in MFP and will play around with how they work together...maybe I can do a red meat for dinner if I do fish for lunch, etc...2
