Building Your Meals 101
Lesson Overview
In this lesson of Onboarding, you’ll cover:
Building Your Meals 101
Current Eating: Adjusting Your Day
Building Your Menu
Building Your Meals 101
Thinking about your custom macros, you may be feeling overwhelmed, confused and questioning how to hit these numbers. Take a deep breath.
To make this program sustainable in the longterm, we’ll focus on making adjustments to your current natural eating habits. First you’ll log a few days of what you normally eat, see how far off you are from your macros goals, and then think about where you can make adjustments to get closer to your numbers.
Current Eating: Adjusting Your Day
If you haven’t already, set your custom goals in MyFitnessPal.
MORE > GOALS > CALORIE, CARB, PROTEIN & FAT GOALS
Practice logging a few normal days worth of food.
How far are you from your macro goals? What can you adjust to get close to your numbers?
Are you way over on fat? Maybe you can choose a salad dressing with less oil, or leaner cuts of a meat.
Way under on protein? Maybe you can incorporate a midday yogurt snack, pack some double protein on your sandwich or start having an egg white breakfast?
Way over on carbs? Try switching to higher volume carbs like leafy greens instead of dense carbs like rice, bread or potatoes. Play around with it.
The closer you can get to your goals without greatly disrupting your eating, the better.
Building Your Meals
As you can see from the adjusting your daily macros exercise above, planning out your food for the day makes a huge difference in how effortless or efforting it will be to hit your numbers.
We love to think of planning your food as planning a menu for your week. It can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. We suggest picking 2 to 3 of your favorite breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, and deserts to start. Then plan out fitting the meals together with the adjustment exercise in MyFitnessPal to get the right portion sizes for you.
In order to succeed, you need to set aside a time to purchase + prepare food for yourself. Open up your weekly calendar, block off some time. I personally like to get my groceries a day or two before I do my prep cook session. Typically this looks like grocery pickup on Fridays and meal prep on Sundays.
When planning your shop and prep, follow these 3 steps:
Build a menu: Have an idea of the recipes you want to make, or snacks you’ll want to have on hand.
Build a grocery list: Go down your menu, and build the list.
Shop: To save time and money, shop in bulk and build your freezer inventory.
Additional Time Saving Pro Tips
Scheduling grocery pick-up or delivery service is an excellent investment to save time and have your groceries delivered to your doorstep or to your car at a convenient scheduled pickup time.
Online grocery reorder list you can create favorites lists and/or reorder from your prior week’s order to purchase your groceries in minutes.
Meal prep delivery services are great options to have in your back pocket incase you’re stuck in a crunch and short on time. Find a local service in your area, save their menu and find out when you need to place your orders for the week to have prepared meals delivered to you. You’ll pay a premium but most places will adjust portions to your macros.
Here is an example of what a menu + list look like.
This may seem like a lot of work now but it will get easier and take less time as the weeks go on.
Next Lesson: Meal Prep Simplified
Now that you know how to build your meals, plan your weekly menu, build your shopping list, and shop.
In the next lesson, you’ll learn how to streamline your meal prep cooking session to be as efficient in your kitchen as possible. We’ll give you our best time saving tips to help speed up your prep session.
Click lesson link below to continue.