January, 2020 - New Image Personal Conditioning

It’s saved me time, money, and from poor food choices when I’m ravenous.

On the flipside, NOT planning because “I don’t have the time” inevitably leads to wasting money on takeaway and putting food in my body that I know isn’t good for me.

When you’re busy, you shouldn’t be worrying about food choices. I can’t think of a bigger waste of your energy, willpower and precious decision making than mulling over what to eat 5 times a day.

As part of honouring your health and your time in 2020, one of the best habits you can implement is planning your food.

Clients really freak out when I start talking about meal planning. They envisage their fridge piled high with containers of dry chicken and soggy broccoli. Gross. I don’t want to live like that either.

Meal planning is simply knowing what you’re going to eat ahead of time and having your choice ready to go. That’s it! Wouldn’t that be liberating?

But I want to be spontaneous!

And how’s that working for you?

You should know by now that after work on Friday you like to have pizza and three glasses of wine. Maybe if you planned for it, you could enjoy it guilt free and perhaps even stop at the second glass.

If you know you’re going out for dinner, it takes two seconds to have a think about what you might like to have, and write it down.

The only way healthy lifestyle changes are going to work – and by “work” I mean you can do them forever – is if they’re enjoyable and don’t get in the way of living your life.

I want you to eat out, go on holiday and try everything. But I want you to do it in an intentional way, with a view to including healthy choices most of the time.

If being spontaneous and up for anything robs you from feeling amazing in your own skin, how fun is it really?

When you make decisions for yourself ahead of time, you’re using your higher, rational brain that knows what’s best for you.

Make choices in the moment when you’re STARVING, rushed and stressed? That decision making beast is not looking out for your best interests.

If you have health and fat loss goals, a little less spontaneity may be the one thing that gets you there.

So we all agree now that planning your meals is a good idea. Right? Right.

Here are some simple steps to start meal planning.

Define what meal prep means to you

You don’t have to splurge on 20 glass containers and spend hours on Sunday making all your food for the week. That sounds completely overwhelming, and you’ve got better things to do.

The best place to start is to simply write down ahead of time what you will eat. Start with the next 24 hours, thinking about what’s on the next day. It should take no longer than five minutes.

Then you can graduate to loosely planning out the week ahead.

This is as simple as:

For breakfast this week, I’ll have yoghurt, oats and fruit.
For lunch, I’ll make wraps with BBQ chicken and salad. Apart from Tuesday and Thursday, when I have client meetings so will eat out.
Dinners will be one of these three options (a, b, c). These are the veggies that I will include this week.
Snacks will be a protein bar/a muesli bar and a coffee.

Then you head off to the supermarket, with a firm view to what you’re actually, realistically going to eat, and buy what you need. And delight in how easy it is to shop when you have a plan!

Use the plate model

The simplest way to plan any meal is using the plate model that we teach our clients. It’s your guiding light for planning your meal, and also works when you consider your day and a week as a whole.

For each meal, you want to fill half your plate with veggies and a bit of fruit, then add a palm size serving of protein, a fist size portion of carbs and a little bit of fat.

Think first: what veggies would I like to eat this week, and how can I make them easy to grab? You could pre chop some salad veggies, trim some beans, and chop broccoli into florets.

Then think about protein sources. Maybe you’d like a bit of BBQ in there one night. A roast chicken is so versatile and can be a lifesaver. And cans of good quality tuna (we like the Sirena variety with chilli) are delicious tossed through a salad.

The point is to pick foods you enjoy eating, that are good for you and aligned with your goals, and then make them easy to go to with a little bit of organisation.

Make it yummy

Know yourself. If you’ve packed a lame sandwich for lunch, you’re just not going to feel like eating it when 1pm rolls around and you’re hanging for something hot and delicious.

Put in your plan foods you know you enjoy eating. Don’t get hung up on making it as lean and low calorie as possible.

The best lunch time meal prep in the world is leftovers from dinner! This is one of my best tips for being excited about what YOU’VE prepared for lunch. Just make extra dinner, and when you serve up, pop tomorrow’s lunch in a container ready to reheat. Easy!

Learn a couple of tricks to make your food taste good. If it’s not yummy and a little bit exciting, your meal prep will end up in the bin.

Avoid too much variety

Have a range of go-to meals that you know you love and are easy to prepare. Having something different every single day for every meal is overwhelming and is only for people with private chefs.

Have the same breakfast most days and rotating between a few healthy lunches that you enjoy will make life so much simpler.

Once you know your go-tos, you can keep staple ingredients on hand so you can always throw a meal together quickly. We always keep on hand a bag of salad mix, cherry tomatoes, tuna, microwave rice and bbq chicken for easy peasy meals.

It’s not boring if you like what you’re eating and getting results. Plus, you can stop thinking about food all the time and redirect all that energy to something else worthwhile!

Get help if you need it

If preparing healthy meals feels too hard, the alternative doesn’t have to be fast food. There are services that make preparing your own meals easy, or that do all the work for you.

We’ve tried a range of services from time-to-time when life gets busy, and they’ve been a lifesaver. You can go for full meal prep services like Food Goals (a local Hills business), My Muscle Chef or Thr1ve. Or if you enjoy cooking but want to skip the planning and groceries bit, you can try a meal kit service like Hello Fresh or Marley Spoon.

The bottom line is that no one is too busy to plan their meals. With just a little forward thinking and getting into the groove with organising your food, you’ll save yourself a ton of time, money and energy.

Last weekend, I had a rare moment with my wife Liz when we could actually talk without a (lovely) little person asking for something or whining “I’m booooooored”. (We’re at that point of the school holidays where that little sentence has taken on a fresh level of whine).

We spoke about what’s hard at the moment. I’m working long hours, Liz is holding the fort at home and squeezing in work.

We both know how much better we feel and perform when sleep and training happens, but neither is getting a big enough priority at the moment. We have purpose, but the days often feel like a struggle.

And when we get to the end of the day, there’s that niggling question: “What about me?”

We decided that this year, in 2020, we will prioritise creating EASE in our lives wherever possible.

We will prioritise our health and happiness, in small daily ways. For me, this starts with getting to bed on time so I can get enough sleep. Scheduling daily movement. Carving out five minutes in a day that’s just for me and my thoughts.

Every single client at New Image is a busy person. To varying degrees, we all feel rushed. And for many of us, it’s a chronic state. We are so attached to “busy-ness” that we neglect our own needs.

And I’d say mums suffer the most from this.

Whether you’re a working or stay-at-home-mum, I find that most mums are amazing at meeting everyone else’s needs and terrible at carving out time for themselves. Even when they’re exhausted, the default mode is to be a tireless caregiver.

Feeling strapped and stretched is a horrible feeling. I want more for you! Over the next few weeks, I’d love you to follow along with me as we explore how you can create more time for yourself, put yourself first (at least for a part of the day) and get bang for buck out of the time you do spend on yourself.

Here are my top 4 tips for creating more time for yourself in 2020.

Set boundaries around work to make more you time

Flexible working arrangements are a wonderful thing. In theory, we can spend more time with our kids, work from home or our favourite cafe, and duck out to appointments during the day, knowing we can catch up later.

The problem is, most of us now have very blurred boundaries when it comes to work and personal life. We’re always on.

Checking and REPLYING to emails at midnight or on Saturdays is no big deal. And if we don’t get an immediate acknowledgment to an email we’re almost pissed off.

No down time is good for no one, and we’re all guilty of lax boundaries around our work schedules. An indefinite work day encroaches on your personal time, leaving you in a constant state of low. And when your time to complete tasks has no limits, this also tanks your productivity.

Have a start and finish time for your work, including when you do work outside of your normal work hours. For example, no emails checking after 8pm. Or no laptops on the couch.

Of course, if you narrow the window you have to complete your work, you’ll have to be more productive. This means planning out your work day, tackling one thing at a time and being very realistic about what’s achievable for you.

Schedule time for daily activity

Carving out time for yourself in any way is going to improve your health. But of course, we’re personal trainers and we want to get you MOVING!

The easiest way to fit exercise in is by making it a daily practice. Even if it’s 20 minutes a day, I want you to commit to moving your body daily. We’ve talked about why this is important in a previous post (read here).

I’ve seen that when people do this one thing, it has a huge flow-on effect to other areas of their time. When you honour your body with exercise, you grow in self-respect, you fuel your body better and you also get better at teaching others your own boundaries.

Exercising daily is a wonderful self-love practice that gets you out of your head and the stresses of daily life and reconnects you with your body.

Make your time in the gym count

When we design our personal training sessions, we are ruthlessly focused on making sure you get bang for buck of your time investment. Having a personal trainer who really knows how to get results is the best way to do this.

A good trainer knows how to program your sessions effectively to help you reach your goals, when to push you and when to pull back. Most importantly, we take every measure to ensure you don’t injure yourself – the ultimate time water.

Our clients train for 30 minute sessions. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but trust me. They get the job done. For people who are really strapped for time, training in a small team or 1-on-1 with a great trainer is by far the most efficient way to exercise.

Have a set bedtime and routine

We’re biased towards the benefits of exercise, but I will stay say that sleeping is the best bang-for-buck thing you can do for your health.

The easiest way to start having better sleep and more of it is to have a set bedtime and a little routine around bed.

This doesn’t have to be elaborate. I’m not asking you to burn incense and meditate for half an hour. Your routine might be as simple as this:

Phone off at 8:30pm
Shower at 9:00pm
In bed and reading at 9:30pm
Lights off at 10

Prioritising your routine may feel awkward at first, or like you have to rush to get everything done in time, but the payoff for your health is huge.

I challenge you to try at least two of these action steps this week.

And notice your thoughts around allowing yourself more time: are you resisting it? Do you feel like you should be doing something else? Observe yourself being uncomfortable with carving out time for yourself, and do it anyway!

Meal planning to save time, money and energy