Podcast: Meal Planning Made Easy: The 5-Minute Solution to Stress-Free Healthy Eating

Introduction

Tired of stressing over what to cook every night? 🍽️ 

Dr. Orlena's latest podcast episode is a game-changer!

 Learn how to create a simple, flexible meal plan that fits your lifestyle in just minutes. 

Say goodbye to mealtime chaos and hello to stress-free, healthy eating. Tune in now to discover the secret to effortless meal planning and transform your approach to cooking! 🥗🥘 

Transcription of Podcast

Hey, hey! Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. I have got a super quick and powerful podcast for you today on meal planning. Why on meal planning? Because this is one of the issues, one of the challenges that I see comes up so often with my clients. And here's what happens is you have an idea of what you want to do, be healthy, you know the kinds of foods that you want to create, but dot, dot, dot, life gets in the way.

And. You know that the secret to figure this out is to do meal planning but meal planning feels like this daunting, awful thing that is going to take up so long and often, in my experience, when I have sat down to try and do meal planning, it's led me down rabbit holes of, you know, trying to look for recipes here, there, everywhere, and it just feels daunting and overwhelming.

So I'm going to show you the system, a really easy system that I use with my clients, and I kind of use with myself in my head, but never actually get to writing it down. Quick reminder, before I dive into how to do this. At the end of September, we are going to be having Dr. Orlena's Healthy Amazing You Boost.

So, towards the end of August, I will show you how to sign up for that when it's ready, basically. But I'm super excited about this. It's going to be a five day boost to really help you boost how to get to Healthy Amazing You. And it's totally, totally free. I'm so amazingly excited about you basically getting some breakthroughs and instead of feeling, oh my goodness, I can't do this, I can't get healthy, I can't lose the weight, I can't do all the things that I want to do, just really get some wins in seeing how easy it is when you have the right system and the right mindset.

Okay, so here's my big secret. How do you do meal planning such that it's really easy? And you can probably do this by the time I have finished talking. Take a pen and a piece of paper. I always have random scraps of paper. Write out your piece of paper. Now, you can focus just on dinners or lunches or whatever it is that you feel is most important.

And this is your stress point, the area that you're falling down, shall we say. Just write out Monday, Tuesday, the days of the week. Now, it depends. You can do all seven days of the week if you want, but sometimes people like to leave Saturday and Sunday free because, I don't know, perhaps you're going out for a meal, or you have more time to be adventurous, or, you know, you just want to keep that free.

So it's totally up for you. You can do all seven days, or just five days, or four days if you want. And here's what you do. You write down the meals that you already make. So, for example, we did this yesterday and one of my clients had bean, sorry, salmon on Monday. Bean chili. chicken fajitas, vegetable stir fry and chicken salad.

And so you just write them down. Now, if you are feeling that your meals are a little bit unhealthy and you want to make them more healthy, then my friend, super easy, add some vegetables. So if you're thinking, okay, I want to just shift a little bit more to healthy eating, then just add in a side of vegetables or two sides of vegetables.

Go buy yourself a cabbage. I said this to one of my friends, my clients, Yesterday, she cooks for just one person, I'm like, go and buy a cabbage, it will last you all week. You can do different things with it, just add a side of cabbage. But, you know, you can use broccoli, or spring greens, or any vegetables that you want.

And if you want to be really adventurous, you can add two sides. I always say, it's better to have more vegetables than less vegetables. Because if they don't get eaten, you've got them in the fridge for lunch tomorrow. Super easy. So, you've got your five or seven days, and that's essentially it. Ideally, you want to do it for two weeks, so you want to do week one and week two.

Now, in those two weeks, you can have repetition, so for example, on Wednesday, I always do bean chilli in the slow cooker, because it is super, super easy, and then, I double it up, so I make a big batch of bean chilli. On Wednesday, and then on Friday, we have bean nachos. So nachos, bean chili, some cheddar cheese, and some delicious tomato fresh salsa on the side.

You can add in other salsas if you want. Other salads, always, always easy. And that essentially is it. So, if you're feeling totally stuck, do one week and double it up. And if you've got enough for two weeks, do two weeks, and you may need to double it up. double up some of the recipes and not all of them and now you stick it to your fridge and now you stick to it but here's the thing you don't have to stick to it religiously if you get home from work and you're thinking oh my goodness i'm so busy and i don't know what i'm cooking for dinner look at your your new meal plan that you have but if you feel inspired to do something else then that's fine too it doesn't matter if you think oh i've got home and i've decided i've got i don't know salmon but actually i want to make a bean salad, then that's perfectly fine.

Now here's the trick to this, is that this is your default if you haven't got anything else to do. But as you go through, you want to be creating your system and thinking, OK, this worked really well, this is staying. This didn't work well, so you know what? I'm going to change it a little bit, or change it entirely.

But it is just a framework that you have. And if you keep going and keep going, and you might want to add in a new recipe, or a couple of new recipes, side note, if you want recipes, sign up. I give out a month of free recipes, so sign up for that. I'll leave the link in the description. in the show notes and you can get a month of recipes.

What you don't want to do unless you have lots and lots of time is go for two weeks of new recipes because you'll just feel overwhelmed. Most people don't have capacity to do two weeks of new recipes. They have the ability to add in one new recipe at the weekend and I advise get used to that recipe until you're happy creating that recipe and then add in another one and another one until you've got More variety and things are easy to do.

So that's it in a nutshell. Write down the things that you are already reading, sorry, eating, creating and eating. Put it on your fridge and then use that to change things or to write notes as you go along so that it's easy. And if you want to change things, That is not a problem either. You can change things.

It's your, it's your system. By system, I mean life. It's your life system. But where you want is it to be easy rather than you using all your brain power, thinking, Oh my goodness, what should I do? And then, you get overwhelmed, and then you get a takeout, or frozen pizza, or something like that. That's what you don't want.

You want to have something so that you can eat that if you want. Now, Another things that we have discussed are healthy desserts. So I'm happy to talk about healthy desserts in another Facebook live stroke podcast. And again, double up the vegetables. More vegetables than you think you are going to eat.

And if you don't eat them, put them in the fridge and you've got a really easy salad for the next day. Okay, my friends have a lovely week and I will see you next week. Bye bye.Orlena