Week 3: design (menu dinner & daily intake)

Planning is key.  If you’re trying to muddle through this weight management gig thinking, “I don’t need no stinkin’ plan!”, you’re grossly mistaken.  You need a plan.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading about weight loss would ya?  I can speak openly and honestly about this topic because I was one of those “no plan needed” thinkers.  Reading books about weight loss, popping pills for weight loss, half-assed attempts at on again, off again exercising for weight loss, counting calories with no regard to nutritional value of the calories consumed for weight loss – none of it seemed to be working for me.  Or…it would work for about 5 seconds, and then I would give up.  You know why?  Because nothing I was doing involved a plan for life.  Low and behold, I needed a solid plan.  Something I could follow forever. Within a week or two of joining Weight Watchers, I was (finally) a woman with a plan.  I learned that the “calories in, calories out” concept worked, but I needed more.   I wanted it to become part of me.  As if it were custom made for me.  The process of coming up with such a plan generally happens after being forced into a corner.  You see, I easily fall into traps.  The most common trap for me in the beginning, you’ll love this one, was the one where you consume all of your calories/Points too early in the day, and they you get to eat air for dinner.  [FYI: Air isn’t nearly as yummy as a well planned dinner.]  Clearly, something needed to change, and it needed to change FAST.  I could talk about planning ‘til the cows come home, so I’ll split the topic into segments to save your brain a bit of trauma.  Today, it’s all about daily intake and menu planning - which go hand in hand for me.  It’s “the big one” as far as planning goes.  If you know what you’re having for the most troublesome meal of your day, the rest of your day falls into place with ease (most days).  For me, that “trouble” meal would be dinner.   Finding this out about myself took a bit of trial, error, time, and keeping a daily food journal.  Dinner is my favorite meal of the day, for so many reasons.  Probably too many reasons to list here on my blog. It might stem from childhood.  That was really the only meal we ever ate together as a family, and I’m not sure how often that really happened because Dad was away a lot.  However, I have fond memories of coming home from school to the smell of dinner cooking.  Now that I’m an adult, dinnertime is when I sit and chat with the kids about school, friends, events, and so on.  Dinner is the meal I usually try all of the new recipes I’ve run across (I do not like missing out on yumminess!).  Dinner is spent catching up with my husband about work, family, plans, etc.  Did you feel that?  It was like an earthquake of the heart.  The emotion just poured and oozed out of me when I told you about my love for dinner.  To top it off, I can’t just skip a meal.  For one thing, I’d be really hungry.  Also, doing so is a metabolism killer.  My family is busy.  I don’t expect everyone to come up with another hour of their day (aside from dinner) to sit and catch up with me.  That’s simply not a possibility.  It’s dinner or bust.  So you can see how not being able to eat dinner with my family was eating away at me.  [ha, ha, ha…a pun!]  Once I realized I was missing out on the whole dinner experience, I went back through my daily food journal pages looking for details & clues.  It became clear that I was doing just what I mentioned earlier in this post.  Eating too much early in the day, and then there was simply no Points/calories left for dinner.  Yes, you can eat low cal veggies to fill you up, but night after night of that gets old FAST.  Especially if you feel deprived in any way, shape, or form.  Plus, there is pretty much nothing worse than watching your family consume all of the yummies you’ve made while you sit back and eat nothing but lettuce and various steamed veggies. It’s simply not fun to relive night after night.  In the middle of my fed up-ness, my mind instantly switched into budget mode.  This thing with calories is really no different than money, and I was determined to fit dinner into my world no matter what! 


What’s your highest bill each month?  Ours is the mortgage.  I make damn sure to have money set aside to pay it.  Money from our paychecks is dedicated to paying that bill loooong before anything else is paid.  I did the exact same thing with dinner.  I started planning for that meal first.  Literally filling out the dinner section of my food journal before breakfast was eaten.   The rest of the day sort of fell into place once dinner was planned.  The budget was successful.  Even if I have to do some creative shifting around with the funds (Points/calories) from time to time, I get the bills paid.  I might even have to go work some overtime/work a second job (exercise more/run an extra mile or two) to get the bills paid, but they get paid.  Sometimes, I hold off paying the cell phone bill (dessert) if I’m running a little short.  But I know I’ll pay that bill (get to eat dessert) very soon, and I won’t be charged a late fee.  It’s just on hold for that day (I’ll get to eat it Friday instead).  Budgeting!Now that dinner has been planned, it’s time to backtrack to breakfast.  I would like to start off with the topic of breakfast by saying….I’m not much of a breakfast fan.  I eat it.  There was a time when I did not.  Like so many others trying to lose weight, I honestly thought if I skipped meals, fat would fly off of my body.  Like so many others, I found out it works totally in the opposite direction.  I kept getting fatter, unhealthier, and feeling worse about myself with each skipped meal.  Again, it’s just not my favorite meal.  To this day, I’ll pretty much eat anything for breakfast just to have something in my stomach.  I’ve learned over time that an even mix of protein and carbs keeps me fuller longer.   I know I need to eat breakfast in order to rev up my metabolism.  Breakfast is called breakfast for a reason.  Break…fast.  Breaking- the-fast.  Your body has been in sleep mode, fasting away, for hours & hours.  From the last time you took a bite of food in the evening to time you wake up in the morning, you have not fueled your body’s fire.  In order to feed the flame (metabolism), you need to put a log on the fire (food).  It took a while to get used to eating breakfast.  I literally felt barfy the first few mornings doing so.  It had been years since I at anything that early in the day.  Before I knew what hit me, I found myself needing to eat in the morning.  Metabolism: ACTIVATED.  Now, I eat several times between waking up and lunch.  Fueling the fire!  And because I know how much of my caloric budget will be spend on dinner, I have a good idea how many I can spend on breakfast.  By trial and error, I discovered I function best with a certain number of Points/calories for breakfast each morning.   It works for me.  It keeps me full until snack time.  The snack, usually a cheese stick or fruit, lasts me until lunch.  Clearly, there’s not an emotional attachment to breakfast or snacks.  Just make a mental note of that.  It’s important because you’re going to see a pattern form before your very eyes in a minute.Dinner & breakfast have been planned.  Not it’s time for lunch.  For me, lunch is a breeze.  Because I know what I’m having for dinner & breakfast, I automatically know there are X amount of Points/calories to spend the rest of the day.  I usually eat leftovers. Or soup.  Or salad.  Or a sandwich.  I keep it light.  I make sure to add at least one piece of whole fruit and sometimes raw veggies if I need a little more “filler”.  Like breakfast, lunch isn’t that big of a deal to me.  It’s simply something I have to do.  Like an event that’s scheduled into my calendar each day.  I’m hungry.  I need to eat.  It’s almost annoying because I have to take time away from whatever I’m working on to pull something together (AKA: heating something in the microwave).   I’m still feeling mentally strong at this point in the day, and can focus on making healthy choices.  I am not tempted to overdo it at lunch.  Do you see it?  There’s not a strong emotional attachment to lunch, either.  Just like with breakfast or snacks.  Interesting.There’s structure to the madness of planning around a “trouble spot”.  You might have initially thought the trouble spots were breakfast and lunch since I was overdoing it during those meals.  However, I knew those meals were not important to me, other than the fact I must eat them for metabolic purposes.  I was only overdoing it because the concept of budgeting my intake had not fully formed in my brain.  Planning is key.  Knowing what you’re eating ahead of time is like a pair of Spanx for your daily meal plan!  It holds everything in place.  Planning is sometimes more of a process & not something you can instantly jump into (same with putting on Spanx!).  For the dinner planning situation, it took a little time to realize what the problem was.  Instead of me saying, “I need to start planning breakfast & lunch so I won’t use up all of my Points so early in the day…..”, I narrowed down where the problem was really stemming from. Dinner!   It’s was a double sided problem to boot.   It’s an emotional issue because of my love for the meal, and also for what the meal stands for in my life.  It made me sad when there wasn’t room in my day for it.  It’s not healthy to just skip a meal.  I had no choice but to face the dinner issue, no matter what, if I wanted to continue this journey.Breakfast, lunch and snacks followed once the dinner monster had been tamed.  Don’t run or back away from issues that pop up throughout this journey.  Running from problems is a behavior that helped get you to the unhealthy place in life you’re trying so hard to change.   So when you see me posting my kooky weekly dinner menu here on the blog from time to time, you know a little more about why I do what I do.  The dinner menu is a road map of sorts.  I would never get in my car, and just start driving around aimlessly.  Once you have a destination or goal, you need a map to get from point A to point B.  That’s what planning a dinner menu does for me.  It provides a roadmap for my day, my week, and my success with keeping the 80 pounds off.  It starts by helping in one isolated area, and then trickles down to help in so many other areas.  That dinner menu makes it so I don’t have to think come 5PM.  It also helps me figure out the weekly grocery shopping list.  If I know what I’m cooking for the week, I know what to buy while shopping.  To top it off, I’m not over buying at the store with the, “I might make ____ so I might need _____”, floating through the back of my head.   Obviously, sticking with a grocery list & not over buying while shopping, helps with a financial budget.   Not to mention, keeping the menu on my fridge keeps my kids and husband from asking me the ever-so-dreaded question……“WHAT ARE WE HAVING FOR DINNER?????”
This post isn’t about planning every breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, etc.  It’s not a micromanagement type of thing.  It’s not to teach you how to go about planning a dinner menu.  [All that takes is a post it note, a pen, and a good cookbook.]  This is about digging deep to figure out where your trouble spot is located, and giving that one problem area a makeover.  Narrow down what portion of your day is the hardest to deal with regarding meals.  Start planning around that one meal for a few weeks.  See if eases the stress of not sticking within your daily intake goal. 

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