6 Tips to Simplify Meal Planning If You Struggle with Diet Mentality
If you feel trapped, overburdened, or powerless about planning dinner for your family, you may be holding on to some unrealistic expectations from diet culture.
Instead of spending even more hours scouring the internet for a perfect recipe, pivot your attention to the following strategies.
1. Shift your thinking.
Use “most of the time” and “some of the time” thinking. For example, “we have a vegetable with dinner most of the time” and “we eat fried foods some of the time.” This mentality is more compassionate and sustainable than strict rules.
2. Try the regular version.
If there are certain foods you deem as off-limits, consider choosing a new item that may be outside of your typical comfort zone. Buy traditional flour pizza crust, full-fat yogurt, chicken thighs, a real brownie, or a drink with some sugar in it. Experiment with these foods until you find what you like, and then…
3. Eat food you like.
Satisfaction is important. Do you ever find yourself putting off a specific food you really wanted, only to find yourself overeating it later? What would have happened if you allowed yourself to eat what you wanted in the first place?
In the book Intuitive Eating, dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch discuss the Pleasure Principle of Health and how the French people’s relationship with food and satisfaction explains their longer life expectancy.
4. Set your kids up for intuitive eating.
Be intentional about language so that kids learn that all foods fit. Avoid calling individual foods “good, bad, healthy, junk, etc.” Model, with your own eating, the unconditional permission to eat all foods, which is a much more valuable gift than making sure they eat their vegetables every night.
5. Focus on what to add, not subtract.
When we get lost in the details of WW points or carb counting, we take away foods and miss out on nutritious meals. Eat a variety of foods in portion sizes that satisfy you - and this will easily provide adequate macronutrients, vitamins and minerals. If you want to improve nutritional content, ADD whole grains, plant-based protein, unsaturated fats, and produce to what you’re already serving.
6. Specify your values:
Choose meals based on what is important to you. Take a moment to consider your one top priority for meals during this particular season of life:
convenience?
fast and easy?
made with few ingredients?
based on cultural tradition?
nutritious?
crowd-pleasing?
make ahead?
comforting?
tasty?
freezable?
When you know what’s important, you only have one criterion to aim for instead of several. For example, if knowing that tasty meals are most important, you’ll be more willing to spend extra time in the kitchen. If convenience matters most right now, then it’s okay that not every meal will be a crowd-pleasing hit.
Reflection
Take a moment to consider the following:
What are your expectations for dinners?
Are your expectations realistic?
Is there room to be more flexible?
What’s one thing you could do this week to make meal planning simpler?
More Meal Planning Tips
Check out my online course to develop a non-diet menu strategy!