To meal plan or not?

The benefits of intuitive eating and food freedom is that you have less stress over what foods to eat since you give your permission to eat ALL the foods.

There are many recommendations and tips out there that meal prep and meal planning is essential to develop healthy eating habits.

So how would meal planning fit in all of this?

Meal planning does put a block into trying to eat intuitively at first, since you are working on trying to practice without rules around eating.

Meal prepping would be more practical in this case, but if you are not careful it can also turn into a stressful practice that can cause burnout.

This is what happened to me. During the winter months, I devoted a lot of time to planning and preparing meals. Although I do enjoy cooking, it got to the point where I was so overwhelmed with it.

I was trying real hard to make great grand meals 6-7 days a week. I read up on food blogs a lot and there are SO many creative recipes out there and was so committed to bring beautiful wholesome meals to my family. I was planning and calculating so much what was going to be made when and what. I didn’t avoid any foods into my meal planning whatsoever so I thought I’d be ok.

I did do some meal prepping on Sundays which made me feel bummed out that the meal prepping I was doing only lasted through Wednesday.

One day I just had a lightbulb moment after trying to figure out what was it that was burning me out so much? Overdoing the meal prep and planning.

Yikes.

So I scaled back. I decided I did wanted to keep meal prepping breakfast that would last up to three days and not worry about the rest of the week. I’ve dedicated to make at least 2-3 dinners from scratch per week and get support with frozen meals for the rest of the days. Make meals more simple (tacos,spaghetti,etc) and more robust if only I had the energy and desire to do so, but not be militant about it. One day to just do take out with something as simple as pizza. Lunch would be either leftovers or something simple like sandwiches.

As we head towards spring and into summer, I am excited to be aware of this now because the last thing I would want to do is hover over the stove for hours on end with the weather being nice and days being longer. I am looking now for a nice sized picnic blanket to take our meals outdoors and looking up all the sandwich and pasta salad recipes which don’t require using the oven or a lot of time. If you have any good ones send them over!

Here’s to making meals simple,without guilt, and work for you and your family,

Deanna

P.S I am bringing back the Intuitive Wellness Cafe podcast and would love to know what topics you’d like me to cover! Let me know and email me deanna@deannakozarov.com