Lose weight the fun way.

Posted on January 27, 2015

Ok! So all great endeavours require a plan!!! And I need a plan I can live with and not feel starving!!

Exercise: swim 2-3x/week, bootcamp 2 hours/week, pilates:10-20 minutes every day

Food:

Pre Breakfast: lemon water

Breakfast: 1 cup cooked steel cut oats (or ancient grain ceral, or banana/egg panckaes) with nuts and fruit and milk, 12 oz juiced veggie/fruit juice

Mid morning snack: fruit and protein (eggs or peanut butter balls, protein smoothie etc)

Lunch: large green salad with lowfat dressing and 1/2 cup quinoa/bean/lentil salad on top, sprinkle of feta or goat cheese

Afternoon snack: chopped veggies and hummus, and additional protein (eggs or peanut butter balls, protein smoothie etc)

Supper: 1 protein (fish, chicken, beef) and steamed vegetables, maybe 1/2 serving carbs.

After supper: nothing!

Beverages: lemon water, tea

In order to make this happen I'm going to have to do a fair amount of prep work including meal planning, veggie chopping for the week and make my protein peanut butter balls in advance. I'm going to have to branch out a bit and learn how to cook things like fish too, and use my crockpot more often for evening dinners. I usually drink coffee but I'm feeling good about giving it a rest for a month and just drinking tea... green tea or black tea in the mornings and herbal later in the day. I'm not sure how I feel about cows milk vs soy or almond milk... and I'd like to make my wheat intake pretty minimal. Kind of paleo, except for oats, or other ancient grains.

I need to figure out how to increase my water intake, since I'm definitely not drinking enough. And I'm hoping my significant decrease of sugar and processed food won't take my body too long to adjust to. I don't want to think of this as a diet at all... just a lifestyle I'd like my life to generally reflect.

So... maybe I'll post weekly menu plans here so that I can have some accountability with what I'm cooking. Mainly I use Pinterest to find recipes, so hopefully I can find some good ones. I was initially irritated I had to wait a week for the challenge to begin, but now i'm relieved, as I can see it's going to take a bit more prep than I realized to shift to super healthy readily-accessible choices!

Comment Now!

Maddie

01/27/2015 11:14PM

Good on you for making a plan! I love making plans - I've currently got a folder with 4 weeks of 4-6 meals a day + workouts. I just write down as many nutritious meals that I love, cut them up and draw them out of a hat so I have something yum, healthy and different each day. I use myfitnesspal to add up the nutritional requirements and I either swap or will delete certain snacks or meals so each day is more balanced. Snacks are usually a serve of my favourite fruit, 30 g of nuts or a high protein, low sugar, gluten free muesli bar. I have coeliac disease so changing it up can be hard :( I often drink a minimum of 3 L of water a day. I LOVE water. But sometimes I'll get sick of it, so I'll mix it up with a glass of low sugar, kj cordial or on a treat day - diet coke. I don't think I could possibly drink one glass before and after everything, like some suggest. I usually just cart a 1L water bottle around the house/work and try to fill it up a minimum of 3 x day. Good luck! :)

momof3

That's awesome Madeleine, what kind of dinner meals are your favourites? I'm looking for new ideas!I definitely need to get a water bottle to cart around with me! I'm keeping a jug of water with lemon slices in the fridge, cause it's yummier for me that plain tap water.

Maddie

Dinner consists of my family's favourite meals - just in smaller portion sizes. My family has always had fairly healthy meals - always using lite, skim or low sugar ingredients. Sides usually revolve around salad, rice or quinoa with peas and corn, or a stack of mixed vegetables (frozen mixed vegetables make it a little less time consuming). Most meals are between 800 kj and 1200 kj, those that are over often have just salad or are a meal themselves (dinner is my largest meal of the day). All of it is homemade too. Options include chilli con carne (our taco mince), san choy bow, plum beef, chicken stroganoff, spaghetti bolognaise, steak diane, pumpkin soup, curry chicken, yellow chicken (more of a curry peanut sauce) and homemade pizza. Leftovers are usually freezable so it saves me time on prepping for other days. They've always been family favourites since I can remember, just let me know if you'd like to try any for something new. :)