Meal planning

Planning your meals can help you control your eating impulses as well as manage your calories, fat, carbs and other nutrients you might be trying to cut down on. Planning your meals includes deciding what you’re going to eat for breakfast, lunch dinner and snacks daily; and also setting an eating schedule. I am working on a 7-day breakfast meal plan that keeps my breakfasts at 150 – 190 calories.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day but they say a lot of things. Some people don’t eat breakfast and are perfectly healthy; so you could eliminate breakfast altogether; but personally I need something to eat in the morning. I have set a schedule for breakfast whereby I eat at 9AM and at no time earlier than that. I am working on a meal plan that not only keeps the calories consumed under 200 but also provides as many other needed nutrients as possible. I have an iron deficit problem that can be dangerous to play with when you have fibroids, so I need to make sure I am getting enough iron daily. And I need to be consuming enough vitamins, calcium and other nutrients to keep my body going strong even on less than 1000 calories per day.

I’ll admit I don’t like this calorie counting business. It is something I always abhorred and never thought I would get caught up in but my metabolism appears to have slowed to a snail’s pace. I swear 500 calories on my body is the equivalent of 1500 for a normal person. It would explain why after about 3 weeks consuming 500 calories and under I’ve only dropped about a size and a half. Once upon a time I’d be in the hospital being fed on intravenous fluids going 3 weeks on 500 calories.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that meal planning could prove to be a key step in the process of losing weight and keeping it off. Not every woman can eat whatever she wants whenever she wants to eat it without any consequence to her figure. Some of us need to pay closer attention to what we’re eating, when and how much and planning our meals can help us to consistently ensure we are eating what is necessary to sustain us and nothing more.