Follow the Four P’s to Organize and Simplify Your Meal Planning!
As the summer begins to wind down and folks head back into a "typical" routine, a topic that comes up a lot amongst our members is about meal planning and prepping. While the term "meal plan" can conjure up images and strong emotions about lists of "eat this and not that" and bland chicken breasts and steamed broccoli, we prefer to guide our members with simplifying this process and creating autonomy and independence with the practice.
The main goal of meal planning and then prepping is to ensure you have the meals you need for the week right at your fingertips which helps to prevent the “what’s for dinner (breakfast/lunch)?” decision making battle and paralysis each day.
While some instagram and pinterest accounts provide ideas for fancy and complicated meals with multiple ingredients, here at Straight Up Strong we aim to keep nutrition straight up simple.
In the video below, Coach Michelle went live on instagram and walked us through an overview of her process when planning her menu for the upcoming week!
She uses a four step process, the “4 P’s” to get herself organized and save time.
Preview your week: look for days and times when you have more or less time for meal creation. Plan to prep most ingredients or the whole meal for time-crunched situations. Grab and go and grab and heat options are your besties during busy weekdays and week nights!
Plan with simplicity: if you are someone who absolutely requires a different option at every meal, everyday, to feel satisfied then meal prepping is going to be a huge and overwhelming challenge for you. Try to stick with consistent meals throughout the week for certain meals and pick one meal to be more varied throughout the week. For example, for this upcoming week, plan for a protein smoothie for breakfast, each day and then grilled chicken with roasted veggies and rice for lunch. Your “variety'' meal might be dinners and you have something different each evening. You can also add variety to the smoothies with different protein powder flavors or different fruits. You can add variety to the lunches by varying your toppings - for instance, maybe on Monday you add a ranch dressing and buffalo sauce and then Tuesday add some melted cheese, avocado, and taco seasoning. Dinners might then be: steak tips with salad one night, tacos on Tuesday and salmon and zucchini packets Wednesday. As part of your prep, ingredients can be prepped ahead of time so everything can be cooked up or prep whole meals ahead of time for those extra busy times! Simple does not have to be boring. Feeling satisfied with your meals is super important so be sure you are planning for things that will nourish AND satisfy you.
Pull out the ingredients. Look at the meals you’ve planned and pull out the ingredients required to actually create the meals. Many of these are likely already in your pantry and fridge which is great! The more you meal plan and prep, the more you’ll have certain meals on rotation throughout the month(s) so it will be simpler to keep main ingredients like seasonings, beans, grains, frozen fruit etc on hand!
Plot out your grocery list. Take the ingredients you need to grab at the store and categorize them by where you find them in your store. That way, you can grab all the produce then meat then dairy etc and not be constantly scanning for items on your list when in a certain part of the store. This should make getting in and out of the store easy-peasy and minimize the impulse buys when grazing throughout the store.
Meal planning should simplify and enhance your life, not add more stress to it! Once you find your rhythm with planning it does become more efficient and (maybe) more enjoyable too. While it might seem like just another chore to do, adding this layer of planning takes away many minutes and hours of decision making and prepping throughout the week. Making it simple and satisfying is then likely to have you eating the food you buy each week and not having bags of lettuce rotting in the back of the fridge (no judgment - this happens to all of us but I think we can agree this is not what we WANTED to happen to the lettuce.) If we’re more likely to enjoy the food we buy then we are also less likely to fall into always ordering take out or grabbing items on the go that may not be as nourishing and satisfying as what we could have planned and prepared ourselves!
Check out the video and let us know what you are planning and prepping this week in the comments!!