Meal Planning for the 21 Day Fix

Meal planning is definitely an important part of pulling this 21 Day Fix Challenge off.  You're supposed to spread your different colored containers out throughout the day, and it took me some balancing to get the right ratio to the meals in a way that also makes sense on how I like to eat.


So, geek that I am, I started with a spreadsheet.  I get really into using Excel, so for me it was actually interesting.  For others, maybe not - but there's plenty of great printouts out there for planning with pen and paper. 


I took a few ideas from sample spreadsheets I found on Pinterest and copied the style of using color-coded cells and adding the workouts and a water tally at the top.  I created a matching tab for Hubs with my meals in there so he could multiply servings and add food for his (he gets about double what I do in most categories).

The idea is to spread it out evenly throughout the day, so I basically just went with a method of trying to make it look like a rainbow.  I stuck to the three meals and two snacks plan, and will tweak to eat more often if  I find myself getting hungry.  The nice thing about the spreadsheet I think is that I can adjust it easily as I see how my body reacts to the balance of food.

As I'm on the lowest calorie plan, I don't have a ton of containers, but once I saw the portion sizes of foods out of the containers I realized that half portions would be a great way to get a little more variety and balance.

I spent more time on it than I thought I would, but that was mostly me playing around with different ratios in the meals and talking to Hubs about his preferences, not to mention the black hole of Pinterest perusal ;)  Check out my Pinterest board, it's growing!   

I incorporated in some recipes I found to try to keep it a little more interesting, as we're going to be repeating a lot.  I started with more variety, but in the end I went with a fair amount of repetition to make shopping and prepping easier.  

T-minus 5 days...