Meal planning helped me lose 19kgs and gain time

Talking about meal planning might make you feel like a 1950s housewife, but I would say to you that the modern woman knows that simple, strategic meal planning supports your busy lifestyle and sets you up for your best hormonal and overall health.

SNEAK PEEK
“Meal planning is not just about feeding your family; it’s about making life easier and helping you feel better by consistently nourishing your body with nutrient-dense food.”

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Create time and reduce stress: Discover how meal planning can save you time and reduce stress, giving you more freedom to enjoy life.
• Supports your health goals: Learn how to beat stubborn weight gain and other perimenopause symptoms with meal planning, by meeting your nutritional needs each day. Avoid the last-minute supermarket dash and takeaway trap!
• Build connection: Find out how involving your family in meal planning can teach valuable life skills, provide more opportunities to connect with your family, and reduce your workload.

Ready to transform your daily kitchen chaos into a streamlined, calmer experience?

Listen to this episode of the Chaos to Calm podcast for Sarah The Perimenopause Naturopath's easy-to-implement method for successful meal planning. Listen Now!


LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE

•  PerimenoGO program details and waitlist

Find out more about Sarah, her services and the Freebies mentioned in this episode at https://www.ThePerimenopauseNaturopath.com.au

• PerimenoGO (because who wants to pause anyway?!) Discover how to use food as your most powerful medicine, smoothing hormonal fluctuations and easing perimenopause symptoms naturally. (Yes, you have more options than hormone therapy!) Say goodbye to feeling out of control and hello to feeling more like your old self every day.
• The Perimenopause Decoder is the ultimate guide to understanding if perimenopause hormone fluctuations are behind your changing mood, metabolism and energy after 40, what phase of perimenopause you're in, and how much longer you may be on this roller coaster for.
• For more, follow on Instagram at @theperimenopausenaturopath.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Chaos to Calm podcast episode number 55. I'm Sarah, the Perimenopause Naturopath, your guide through this journey of perimenopause. So if you're over 40 and feeling like you're changing hormones, a hijacking your mood, energy, and weight, and you want to change that in a holistic way, then this is the place for you because each episode I share with you my views on what the heck is happening in your body.

Why you're feeling the way you are and what you can do about it with actionable advice to help you feel more calm, in control, less stressed and more comfortable in your body. Thank you for sharing your time with me. I'm so glad that you've joined me today, but let's get straight into today's topic so we can start shifting your perimenopause experience from chaos to calm.

Now this episode, we are going to shift our kitchen. Maybe even our life from chaos to calm, which in turn, of course, is going to help take your body and your mind from chaos to calm what I'm here for on this podcast today, what is this magical thing that's going to transform our life, our kitchen, our bodies, it's meal planning. I bet you thought it was going to be something way more fancy or exotic than meal planning. Cause you might be thinking, well, that sounds time consuming and B O R I N G-- boring. But stick with me because I promise it's not as time consuming, it's not as daunting or as boring as it seems, and it actually has the potential to save you a whole bunch of time, stress, and money, and give you the opportunity to hit your health goals, quicker than what you might otherwise have.

I love meal planning, but I do love lots of structure in my life. And do why I like this structure? Well, a wise woman called Tammy, who I know, she once told me that with structure comes flexibility and freedom. And what? She was not wrong. It's a hundred percent true. Especially if you're neurodivergent like me, it saves me literally walking in circles, checking my calendar multiple times per hour or checking my shopping list a million times or going to the shops with no shopping list. So it saves me doing that whole circling, walking around in circles, trying to remember what I need, how do I be ready? And then probably not having stuff ready than having to do takeout or a last minute dash to the supermarket to buy ingredients. So we all know how that supermarket visit goes when it's at the last minute. You don't really know what you're going to be cooking or what you want to make. Maybe by that time you're actually really hungry already. You feel overwhelmed. You feel confused. You grab a whole bunch of stuff that I mean, if you even have a list, it's probably not on there. Just what seems appealing or yummy to you at that time. If you end up doing that a few visits each week, well, your grocery budget is going to be blown out of the water. And these, I read something a little while ago that said that the cost of groceries in Australia had gone up 30 percent in the last 12 months.

And I believe that my shopping bill has definitely gone up that much in that time. So it's really important for most of us to keep within our grocery budget at this time and to make our dollar go 30 percent further than it has before. So, this is why meal planning really is so valuable and the return on investment for meal planning is huge, probably more than 30%. I have no facts or figures to back that up, except that I know it works really well for me and for my clients who put the effort in to doing it as well. 

So, mastering the art of meal planning and let's not muck around. It is an art. It is a skill and it takes time to develop it for sure. And to develop a process that works for you. It's not just about feeding you and your family, but it's about making life easier and making you feel better by consistently nourishing your body with nutrient dense food and smoothing out. The hormonal fluctuations of perimenopause, because that's what you do. If you're eating to the plan of what works well for you in perimenopause, if you don't know that, then hang around here and check back in my archives, or even think about joining my new program, PerimenoGO.

Cause it's literally what I'm going to show you how to do, how to eat, how to feel good in perimenopause. And we do it in four weeks. But in perimenopause, what we eat, significantly impacts our mood, our energy, our overall health, your waist, your weight, all of those things. So understanding what foods to eat is one part of the equation and meal planning, I think, is the other essential part of the equation.

Because without a plan, you're going to go AWOL. You're going to go away from your health goals. You're not going to eat what you decided was going to work for you and works for your body. A whole bunch of other stuff is going to end up on your plate or a whole bunch more takeaway or fast food is going to end up there.

And those foods are not going to move you towards your goals. Those foods totally can fit within your, the way you eat and your lifestyle, a hundred percent, but more than a couple of times per week. Not so much for the majority of us, particularly if you're not feeling great, like if you've already addressed your health concerns and got your body back in balance, got your hormones like insulin and your blood sugar levels back in balance and your body composition where you want it, then maybe more than a couple of times a week would certainly fit there, but if you have health issues that you want to address, then not so much. 

So, like I said, meal planning is an art. It's a skill. It takes time to develop it. So if you don't like it, you don't like the process. Maybe it takes a while at the start, please persist. Like we didn't learn to walk as babies on the first try.

And we certainly didn't get to give up. We didn't give up on driving. It was hard. That was a new skill we were learning. It was difficult. At first we really had to put a lot of mental effort into it. Over time things become a lot easier for us and more at the school becomes subconscious and we don't have to spend so much time thinking about it.

Part of meal planning and what makes it work for me and for many others is actually just making it, working on the process that works for you and making a regular time to actually do it. And then using and implementing the plan and it'll be trial and error. What works for me, which is what we're going to talk about today might not work for you, but I went from hating on meal planning and wanting to be spontaneous. Well, that didn't work for me. It didn't work for my budget and it didn't work for my health. And now everyone participates in our meal planning process. Everyone actually participates in cooking in my house as well, which is wonderful. We've been doing that since January. It's now July. I actually can't believe that it's still happening that way. But this meal planning and my process, which is only takes me an hour, I call it set it up Sunday. And that's what I'm going to talk you through today. It's how I set myself up at the start of the week in terms of my work and my business things that I need to do, but also my mum life and running the house. Sunday might not work for you, might do it a different day. Anyway, it doesn't need to take forever. It can be really quick process and just no more excuses. Give it a go. Yeah, and like I understand why you might think that it takes too long, but usually if you're the person that's thinking I don't have time for this, you need it the most.

Like I've got four kids. We homeschool. My husband was running his own business. I was running my own business. Some of my early parenting life I was studying. We're busy, right? And as I said, I tried spontaneity that doesn't work because then I spend so much time and so much capacity thinking about food, shopping for food. What am I going to cook? It'd get to five o'clock and my decision making. Part of my brain, it was done for the day. I had used up all the decisions that I have in there. And you might think I'm joking about that, but we do have a certain amount of capacity for making decisions. And if you think about life as a mom or a woman running a home and working and all the things that we do, by the time it gets to dinner at the end of the day.

Your decisions, you're kind of out of decisions. You've got none left to give. And that's when you end up making decisions about food that doesn't suit your gut, doesn't match with your goals. You have a mismatch there. So I would, I got really sick of that. It was about the time when I implemented my own metabolic balance personalised nutrition plan for myself.

So that's over four years ago now. And that's part of what I love about personalised nutrition and using it with my clients is that it helps prompt us or gets us into that habit. And it, and the process of implementing your personalized nutrition plan or implementing a nutrition plan, like a perimenopause friendly one that is, I will use in PerimenoGO.

It's part of its effectiveness is that it stimulates these habit change or the behavior changes around food and your cooking and what you're eating on daily. So, the food itself is one part of it, but it's a habit change around your approach to food that is a significant, benefit from it there as well.

So, yeah, that's really when set it up Sunday came about because I needed to have specific foods in the house for myself. And I dinner was the dinner's the most often the meal that most families are sharing together. Breakfast and lunch is often, you do your own thing and unless maybe your kids are younger and they're eating what you're eating, but my kids are older now and they tend to make their own breakfast and lunch. And of course they eat at different times to me because they're not getting up at six when I get up, cause they're all, well, three of them are teens, one tween, But yeah, let's talk about how it might benefit you and your family there as well, because, it really benefited me.

I'm quite passionate about it and I do encourage my clients. And if you want to hit your health goals and you want to achieve certain things using food as medicine and lifestyle changes, then, planning that structure gives you flexibility because you don't have to think about food so much, meal planning gives you an efficiency that, like I said earlier, the return on investment for the time that you spend on meal planning saves you so much more.

It means that you spend less time figuring out what's for dinner each night and you spend less time answering that question too, because if you put it on a notice board or put it into a shared calendar with your family, everybody knows what's for dinner and they know who is cooking that dinner as well.

So you can spend more time getting on with your day and doing the things that you need to in your day and enjoying your meals and your family time there. I think it's like a gift to your future self. And one that pays dividends as well. Now I've mentioned that my kids who are almost 20, 17, 14 and 10 and a half, they each take a turn in cooking dinner every week.

So it's fallen into a rhythm now, cause we've been doing this for six months that they have their night that they're in charge of and, they've learned so much about from doing that. And my older two have been cooking meals for us for a while, but the younger two have just taken that on this year.

And we kind of really got into the habit where everyone has a night. There's six of us in the house. So it's one night each and on the seventh night is a leftovers night or make your own, or sometimes we might go out for dinner together. So yeah, everyone takes a turn cooking dinner. Everyone takes a turn getting to pick what's for dinner.

Now, if your kids aren't old enough and, like my younger two, I cook with them and that's really lovely as well. Actually, we get some time together in the kitchen to connect while we're cooking and have a chat and, talk about different things, have a laugh. It's actually, cooking is fun.

I don't, I like cooking, but I really love cooking when I have company. And I think most people like that too. The worst bit about having to cook dinner night after night is that you have to think of what to have and also then cook it all on your own. So, having your family involved in it, in helping you decide what's for dinner and and then also cooking it is really nice there as well.

So they learn a lot. We get to connect and I don't have to cook as much. Definite win. And I don't have to cook on my own so much. So I've talked a little bit about how planning your meals really helps ensure that you're getting a balanced diet. You can make sure that you're getting, different protein groups across the week.

Some red meat. Some white meat like poultry, fish, other seafood, some vegetarian proteins, you can really, some weeks you might have need to have a more budget friendly, so maybe you might have more vegetarian proteins and other weeks you even if it's like you're menstruating, you might have some more red meat meals that way to provide more iron rich foods.

So you don't feel so depleted or tired. You could really, you can really dive deep into your meal planning and make with it from what you want, but having that, balanced diet. And for me, I mostly just plan dinner and I'll talk a bit more about that in a minute, but you might plan your breakfast and lunch and dinner.

And really, I've had clients in the past that do that because they work full time as well as being a mum. So, and then on a Sunday, they make up all their lunches for the week and their breakfast as well. Have it all in the fridge, so they just have to pull one out each day. And if that works for you, you could totally do that as well.

So what I love most about meal planning is that if I've been out all day and it's super busy, I know exactly what's for dinner. I also know that the groceries are all in the fridge or the freezer, like it's all there. I don't have to worry about it. And I know I've also picked a meal that's going to fit in with me, maybe getting home at five and still wanting to have dinner around six.

It's there's no last minute stress. I don't have to dash into the supermarket on the way home. It's just, pleasant, calm, and, sometimes if I get home at five or I get home later, I don't even have to cook because it's someone else's turn to cook dinner. Even better. I just get to come in and chill out and, transition from a busy day into winding down for the evening.

Now meal planning, Can also reduce your food waste significantly. So there's that, I've got a stat that it can cut your food waste by up to 30%. And since our cost of living has gone up by 30%, that seems like a good figure, a good figure, to cut it by like, you, you definitely, and I think factoring in the leftovers night helps amplify that.

So as well, like, or reduce that waste further because you can repurpose what you've got left over or have a bit of a mix and match night there as well, so that you don't have to waste any food or like the other night I made a soup with some bits and pieces that needed to be used up and pop them into the pot, delicious dinner with some toasties, simple, like food doesn't have to be fancy.

I think that we, all these wonderful cooking shows are on show us like what we can do with food. And we forget that actually on the daily, we don't really need to make fancy things with our food. The flavor is in the quality of the vegetables and the proteins that we're using and the herbs and the spices and the, the freshness of it there as well.

So I'm going to talk you through some tips now, because I love helping you have some practical tips so that you can implement. What I'm talking about meal planning into your life there as well. So one thing that I did when I first started meal planning was I had a list and I put it on the fridge of meals that everyone liked.

And if I cook something new or different and the kids liked it, it went on the list. So, on a Sunday when I was meal planning, I'd get the list out and try and include a few meals from there each week, as well as one or two new ones or different ones. Because yeah, meal planning doesn't have to be like, I remember when I was growing up, there was a family and they would have, every Tuesday night was schnitzel night.

Every Wednesday night was fish night. Every Thursday night was steak. And them. I guess that's meal planning to the next level, isn't it? Like you really just never have to think about it again, but also that can be quite boring. And I understand why you might think, well, meal planning is boring if that's your approach to it.

So I always try and do something different or something we haven't had before. And my kids, when they picking something are a bit more predictable around, what's popular with most kids, pasta and tacos and things like that come up a lot. So yeah, you could just start with planning a few meals if you want and then expand on your plan from there.

Or one thing I've always asked my kids, like each kid got to pick a dish or, I would heavily suggest something they might want to pick. But yeah, then at least they know at one meal of the week, they're going to definitely love. And the other thing that I would do. So when I sit down at that, I would get my recipe books out or I choose a recipe book for the week and have a flick through and see if anything caught my eye there.

So from there, what I will do is check the pantry, fridge and freezer and see what I've got in there. What do I, what do I have a lot of that maybe I could cut down on or, sometimes when I'm doing my online grocery order, I forget that I ordered some, lots of tins of chickpeas. Last week and then I order some more.

So, maybe I might use the chickpeas this week. From there, then I'll try, I'll think through the dinners that I want. I write them on a board. So we have a big life board that has, a big calendar on it. So everyone can see what's coming up for the week and the month ahead. And also they know that I put there, the foods or the meals that they're eating for dinner. And that means that when they're thinking about their lunch or making their lunch, they don't have, the same kind of protein that we might be having for dinner. And let's see how much they're going to like it or not.

And if they're going to have a really big afternoon snack. And then not have much dinner. So I write that on there. I also, I like to use on my phone. I have a like your calendar app on your phone. I have a shared one with my husband that tells us about, who's cooking and what night they're cooking on there as well.

So that's mostly for me so that when I'm out and about, I can remind myself who's cooking and what's for dinner there as well. So once I've worked out that and I write it up as I go and I'm thinking about it and juggle it around, as I said, everyone has, has fallen into a rhythm of what night they're cooking.

I also look at it in the context of the calendar and say, well, I'm not going to be able to help you on that night, but maybe dad will, or, or it's my night to cook then and I'm not going to be home. So maybe I'll switch it around or I'm only going to have a very short window of time, or maybe I need to make a slow cooking meal that day and pop it on in the morning before we go out.

So that's the kind of things that I'm thinking about when I'm thinking of some things to cook. Whack it on the board. And then I make a shopping list. I do my shopping online and get it delivered because that saves me time. And I can also do it while I'm there. If I'm like the kids have a recipe that they've found, or I found a recipe for them, I can look through it and go, right, I need that, that, and that pop it into the app, put my order in and we get that delivered early in the week so that we have everything there. And my husband will often do an Audi shop on a Sunday as well to get the things that we need from, there.

One thing I love about online shopping is I am less likely to impulse buy. Although when you're going through the checkout, it does tell you, Hey, did you forget to buy this again? So sometimes my bill still ends up large anyway. But at least it's stuff that we're actually going to eat, of course. 

So one of the other things that I've done a lot in the past, if I, when I was cooking. Like when I was doing more of the cooking on my own was I would prep in batches. So on that Sunday, as well as doing a meal plan, I would spend an hour or two cooking some meals or making large batches of things so that we had a dinner. But then I also had one for the freezer as well. And even when I am cooking generally, like the soup that I mentioned, I made the other night, I made a double batch of that so that there's some in the fridge for lunches, during the week or that I can pop into the freezer so that if we are pressed for time, or maybe, like I said, maybe I'm out and it's my turn to cook, I'll get something out the freezer. So there's still food there as well. 

Now, you don't need to use a tool with meal planning as I said, you can just use pencil and paper. That's all I ever used at the start. And I write it on the board. I like to use my phone calendar now because everything kind of is in my phone, but I don't have a special app for it. I don't think you really need one. I know there's probably some around. Maybe that might make life easier for you, but sometimes it can actually just make things feel more complicated and overwhelming.

And we want to make this as quick and as simple as possible. Right. So, yeah, and like I mentioned, for some families meal planning might be planning every lunch and dinner or breakfast as well for others like me, it's just planning dinner and making sure that I have the ingredients for the meals that we'll cook in the house.

And I think that's, worth acknowledging that your meal planning and prepping, it might just be making sure that you have a rough plan of what protein you're going to cook on that night. You might not have a specific recipe in time, just in your head just yet. But, you might have an idea of, all right, I'm going to cook a beef or steak or something like that, or we're going to do a roast and having those ingredients in the house so that you can make them.

If you have a bit more time and capacity, then that can certainly work well. And that's something I've done in the past, but at this time, like I said, I do set it up Sunday because I invest an hour and I know for the week. What's going on for me work wise. I know when I'm doing my work. Like I even schedule in, okay, I'm going to prep for my podcast on Monday morning at 10 AM.

So if Monday morning is 10 AM, I'll be at my desk prepping for this week's podcast episode and Tuesday, I will record that. And then on Wednesday, I'm hanging with the kids and Thursday, I've got client calls, but I'm also doing some other social media stuff and or course content. So, I will plan it down to that level of detail there for my week. And then I know how much time am I going to have in terms of prepping food and cooking and those sorts of things. I do a, a swing around the house. What do you think you're going to cook this week? Are you still good to cook on Wednesday? What are you going to cook? Do you need a recipe? Have you got one?

Can you share it with me so I can do the shopping? So that's what we do on Sundays before dinnertime. I'll help the kids choose their recipe and make sure we have all the ingredients, pop it straight into the the shopping supermarket app so that by the end of that session, by the end of that Set it up Sunday, my power hour. I have a plan for the meals. The shopping is done. I know what I'm doing for my work week. And it's written on the board, what everyone's cooking across the week. And I might've also done some food prep as well. So, yeah, so, and because I work from home when we homeschool, our meal prep looks a little different.

We can have a cooked lunch. I don't have to worry about lunch boxes so much. We just make our lunch meal when we're ready. And the kids might eat at a different time to me, or we might eat together and then we might have a hot lunch. But I always have a plan and there's always ingredients ready.

There's always good quality proteins, lots of vegetables and fruit in the house, much to my kids disgust, we are an ingredients house. If you want a snack or a treat, you kind of have to make that yourself and do the baking. And then when we go out, because I am a celiac, I do prefer to take my food with me most places to ensure that I don't get gluten and then get really unwell.

So of course we save money doing that, but I'll tend to just take like a picnic for us as well. And we just share and eat from there as well. So yeah, I really like meal planning. I like set it up Sunday. I think the really unexpected benefit for meal planning and doing it this way was that it does bring us together and we get the opportunity to plan our meals and, and work together on it and also cook together.

So it is a really lovely time. We, do nice things and my kids are learning. Valuable life skills. And there was a time during COVID lockdowns that we were doing a around the world tour. And each Saturday night we'd have a dinner party and the thing we'd go to a different country and cook meals from there, like their cultural dishes and things like that.

It was so much fun. It's something that you could do with your family. Particularly as homeschoolers, it gave us the opportunity to learn a lot about different countries and their culture and their foods. But it's just kind of really fun to shake things up for you there as well. I didn't, it wasn't particularly hard either.

So yeah, that's set it up Sunday. That's my meal planning process. I hope that's really helpful for you. I hope you understand the art of meal planning and how to build your skills so that you can use it to your advantage. Especially in perimenopause when you have fluctuating hormones and you might want to get on top of that stubborn hormonal weight gain that comes up meal planning. So I think really integral to this as well. So just start small and simple. The key is just plan a few meals each week and gradually build from there. And it's about reflecting on the process and refining it and making it work for you there. We won't, it's not about getting it perfect from the very first time, nothing in life is about getting it perfect the first time that just doesn't happen.

And that just holds us back from trying anything. Meal planning, like I said, it's a skill, there's an art to it. You'll find what that process is that works well for your family by trial and error. And I think the key is getting your family involved. So it's not just another giant chore that you need to take on, on your own.

And I know it can feel harder to get your family involved at the start. It feels like more work because it is more work often, but remember, think about the long term plan and that return on the investment, because you will have people that cook with you or cook for you or help with the shopping or help with the meal planning. So it's not all your mental load there as well. 

And lastly, make a routine of it, set aside the time, don't skimp on it and don't skip it because you'll, the more that you do it, the easier that it gets, the quicker that you get with it and you'll notice the benefit to yourself there as well. So last thing, like I was mentioning before, if you want help with making meal planning a breeze, then keep an eye out for my new program, PerimenoGO.

It's literally got meal plans in it with recipes for you. for you that you and your family can eat together. And that will teach you not just what to eat, but the how and the why and the when, so of what you're eating, what's going on in your body and what your body needs from you so that you can beat that stubborn hormonal weight gain, get rid of those other perimenopause symptoms and just, feel like your old amazing self again. It's a four week program. It's not a huge commitment of time for you there. It's actually going to be a really easy way for you to implement or start thinking about meal planning there as well.

Now, if you found this episode helpful, please do share it with a friend who you think might need some meal planning inspiration. And if you're looking for more resources or to submit a question, please visit the show notes at www.chaostocalmpodcast.com, and you'll also find the link there for more details about PerimenoGO and to join the weight loss at the weight loss.

You'll find the link to join the wait list there. And that's what you want to be on the wait list because you're going to get access to a special founder's price, a whole bunch of bonuses that honestly I will not repeat again. And same with the price. And as I said, the program really is your gateway to feeling like your amazing self again.

Now in the next episode, I hope you'll join me because I'm going to be exploring soy. Is it your friend? Is it your foe? You'll have to tune in next time to find out, make sure you subscribe to Chaos To Calm. So you don't miss that episode or any other. And once again, thank you for listening and sharing your time with me today.

I hope you have a great week.