Mastering Meal Planning: Easy Strategies for Healthy Eating and Busy Lifestyles with Heather Carey’s Bowl Method

Are you tired of the daily struggle to prepare healthy meals amidst a busy schedule? Join host Heather Carey, a passionate nutritionist and chef, as she unveils the transformative power of meal planning in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories. Heather emphasizes that meal planning is not just a time-saver; it’s a crucial step towards reducing stress and embracing a healthier lifestyle. With her innovative ‘bowl method’, she offers a practical solution tailored for women navigating the challenges of midlife and menopause health.

Meal planning can feel overwhelming, especially when juggling family food influences and the demands of daily life. Heather’s approach simplifies the process, allowing you to create delicious, nutritious meals without sacrificing flavor. The bowl method is all about building a satisfying base of whole grains, proteins, and seasonal vegetables, topped with vibrant dressings or dips that elevate your culinary experience. This method not only supports healthy eating tips but also encourages mindful eating practices, helping you connect with your food beliefs and culture.

Throughout the episode, Heather shares invaluable nutrition advice, including her secrets for prepping in advance, freezing meals, and maximizing energy levels for cooking. By embracing these cooking techniques, you can conquer the kitchen with confidence and make peace with your food choices, even during the most hectic weeks. Heather understands the emotional eating struggles many women face, and she aims to provide you with the tools to overcome food confusion and embrace a balanced diet.

As we delve deeper into the conversation, Heather also touches on the significance of nutrition and health during midlife, offering insights into the Mediterranean diet and the seven pillars of abundance. With a focus on sustainable eating and culinary wellness, this episode is a treasure trove of information for anyone looking to enhance their culinary skills while prioritizing their health. Whether you’re exploring weight loss stories or seeking to understand the impact of hormone therapy and nutrition, Heather’s empathetic guidance will inspire you to make healthy lifestyle choices.

By the end of this episode, you’ll not only feel empowered to tackle your meal planning but also reminded of the importance of self-care through proper nutrition. Don’t miss the chance to engage further with Heather’s meal planning resources and become part of a community that values real food stories and personal food journeys. Tune in and start your journey towards a healthier, more fulfilling relationship with food today!

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Hi everybody and welcome back. If you are tuning in for the very first time, it is so nice to meet you and I’m really glad you’re here with me. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relationship to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Did you have a chance to listen to last week’s episode on meal planning? I hope so, and if you haven’t, you might want to circle back to that episode just to get a better sense of what I’m going to share with you today. But to sum up from last week, meal planning takes, well, some planning, and I am sure, dear listener, that you are a very good planner with all sorts of things like job commitments or doctor’s appointments or your vacations. Meal planning is no different. And when you know exactly what you want to meal plan, it becomes even more motivating to do it. Some great reasons to meal plan are the time you will save yourself in the long run, the stress you will save yourself by knowing exactly what you are making for dinner every night, or a health issue you want to finally address, such as losing weight. Meal planning puts you in control of your food. And food, as we all well know, plays a huge part in our lives. It’s something we cannot avoid, and it’s something we need to do every single day. So let’s make it as important as anything else you give your attention to. But like work, or life in general, we sometimes just simply run out of time. Time is one of our biggest assets in life, and we only have a finite amount of it. I’m consistent with my meal planning, and I have also had those weeks where I honestly feel way too busy to do it all, like we women like to take pride in sometimes. Listen, we simply cannot do it all. Trying to be everything to everybody and burn ourselves out on exhaustion is not the goal. Taking care of ourselves first means nourishing yourself on multiple levels. Eating well should definitely be one of them. I still need to know, though, that I’m not falling back on quick and convenient or any junkie takeout when I’m just crazy busy. Sure. Of course, it has happened to me before, but for me, eating well is so important to how I feel that it is what keeps meal planning a priority for me. But back to busy. What do you do then when you are literally out of time to make dinner every single night? When most of your time is spent on other priorities or you have an emergency that week and you just don’t. have the minutes to spend looking through recipes. Well, I have a solution for meal planning when you are just that strung out. I call it my bowl method, but you can also call it meal planning for the insanely busy if you want to. The bowl method does not actually mean you are sacrificing nutrition or making food just taste bland and boring. It actually is you making your food taste just as great. It is just also a simpler way to eat and it can actually work for you. If simple is just what you want, it doesn’t have to be for just the busy in us. The truth is not all of us love cooking. Not all of us enjoy getting the meditative benefits out of chopping vegetables or joy out of growing our own food or even searching for recipes on the internet every week. There’s a lot of people who just do not like to do that. So in the spirit of not taking up a lot of your time, I will jump right into the bowl method and how it works. Now, again, if you did not listen to last week’s episode of meal planning, be sure to take a listen to get caught up on what foods should be included in your meal plan and why. I created the bowl method out of necessity because the busier I got, the more I had to learn to simplify things. And I created a very streamlined system. which makes meal planning even easier and simple when you have an especially busy week coming up and you just feel like you have no extra time. Rather than sitting with recipes and giving deep thought about what you would love to eat during the week, I approach this way of meal planning very strategically. So here is how I plan out the bowl method. for at least a couple of days during the week. At the beginning of the week, I will make a whole grain, and that can be brown rice, quinoa, farro, wild rice, whatever whole grain you enjoy. Think about how many meals you will be eating this for and how many people you are cooking for. A serving of a whole grain is about a half of a cup. cooked. Now you could use this grain for three lunches and for three dinners. That’s typically how many days I would extend any food. If you want a variety of grains, then make two whole grains. And if you want one to be a starchy type of a vegetable rather than a grain, then make something like roasted sweet potatoes. You could also make a you vegetable source such as cauliflower rice or zucchini noodles. Next up, make some protein, some lean protein. That could be salmon, chicken breast, shrimp, tofu, beans, hard-boiled eggs. Think about what you want to eat and make a couple servings of that as well. It’s summer right now, so you might want to throw all of this right on the grill and cook it that way. You can also roast any of your proteins, boil the eggs. And then the most important part for me is a variety of different seasonal vegetables. I will roast, grill, or saute whatever is in season at the moment. Depending on what time of year it is, think seasonally. Again, it is summer right now, so the season is open to a variety of different vegetables. And also consider what type of cooking method you will use. I don’t really grill in the winter, but if you do, that’s okay too. And finally, and another very important consideration, is to make our food taste great. And I will make two dips or dollops or a dressing that are fat-based. These are the hits of flavor you need to bring some variety to your bowl. This part of the bowl ensures two things. One, you are getting healthy fats in your diet. And two, that your food tastes amazing. Remember, fat is an essential nutrient in our diet, but fat also carries flavor. It adds satiety. It’s what makes our food taste so good. Remember the plate I talked about in the last episode? Well, same goes here, and I’ll review it again. When you are making your bowl, be sure to load up on those low-calorie vegetables. Make that half of what you eat. Make a quarter of the bowl protein and a quarter of the bowl your whole grains, and then drizzle the dollop or dressing right onto the top. So you can see that what you are making is pretty simple stuff. You can practically make these components without recipes. But what about the healthy fats? What would make a great dollop or dressing? I like to use strong flavors when it comes to these because a little can go a long way. So for example, a miso tahini sauce. I just made that the other day and I make this sauce often. I have a link in the show notes for some of these drizzles along with a wrap up of how to make the bowl method work for you. So be sure to grab that. Okay, so you You are grasping the bowl method, but I also wanted to share a few secrets to make meal planning even easier, no matter what way you are meal planning. And I’ve learned these secrets over the years of trials and tribulations, and they really do honestly help. So number one of my meal planning secrets is to pick a day where you have a few hours and get some of that prep out of the way. For me, this is typically a Sunday because I don’t have work. I just have more time, not a lot of commitments. So on that day, I’ll chop the vegetables I need cut up. You can make a muffin or a… sauce that you can freeze, such as a pesto, you can make a grain and that can go into the freezer. Grains freeze really nicely. So pick a time where you have a couple hours during your week to get some of these things out of the way. My number two meal planning secret is to always be sure to double and freeze anything that you can. And that can include soup. soups, pestos, muffins, casseroles, whole grains. There is really actually nothing that you cannot freeze. It’s just that texture can become an issue, as in vegetables, for example. So if you’ve ever bought a bag of broccoli, frozen broccoli, you know that it’s just a little mushier than if you have used it fresh. They can just get sort of mushy from freezing, but they really are still perfectly fine and just as nutritious as fresh vegetables. So the other day, for example, I pulled out a ton of beets from my garden. And if you’re not familiar with fresh beets like that, they have a green that grows on top and you can use the greens too. Such a great value from beets. You can use the beets and you can use the beet greens. So anyway, I had loads of them and I knew that I was going away and I would never use all these beet greens at one time. So I chopped and I blanched the greens, which simply means putting them into boiling water for a few minutes. And then I took them out, let them cool and place them in freezer bags in the freezer. So I’ll use them the next time I’m making a soup or needing to maybe blend some greens like in a smoothie where I just don’t mind the texture. So it was really a great way to use up. up those greens. And my meal planning secret number three is to find your pockets of time and energy. Now I am a morning person. I am up with the sun. So my energy is definitely at its best at 6am rather than 6pm. So I wake up super early and sometimes cook dinner then, especially if I know I am coming home late from work that day. or I just even want to get a head start with dinner. It’s not a big deal for me to reheat food, but I can at the very least maybe even prep a couple things so that they’re ready to go for when I just want to throw dinner together in the evening. And my final secret to meal planning, and this is where the bowl method especially addresses this, is to cook once, eat twice, and sometimes a third time. Save yourself time and make last night’s dinner today’s lunch. Make double of whatever you are cooking and eat it the next day or even freeze it. Always be thinking ahead with that. In the spirit of saving you time today, I’m going to end here so you can start on your bowl method meal planning journey. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, if you have any thoughts on today’s topic, please feel free to leave a comment to continue the discussion. Look for my links in the show notes for my meal planning summary of the bowl method and a couple recipes in there for you to try. Also, if you love this podcast, do not hesitate to rate and review it. I would love it. Have a great week and bye for now.