You never intended to eat pizza 3 times last week…
But it happened.
How many times have you been invited to an event, meeting or party and told that food would be provided?
Having been the person in charge of the food for multiple meetings and parties, it is much easier to simply order pizza, chicken wings or some other catered fast food. This keeps the cost down and for the most part, everyone is happy with your selection.
If you’re trying to lose weight and improve your nutrition, you’ll need to have a plan in place so you’re not constantly derailed by all the food-centric events in our lives.
If you want to eat better and improve your body composition, the single best thing you can do is to Plan Your Meals In Advance.
This is easy to do. It’s also easy NOT to do.
When you don’t have a written plan in place for your meals, you significantly increase the likelihood of making a decision that is NOT aligned with your goals.
If you’re eating 3 meals per day (without a plan), that’s 21 chances per week to a make an unhealthy decision. If you’re eating 2 meals per day, that’s 7 less decisions to make each week but each decision becomes more important.
It only takes a couple of meetings, events, parties, office lunches or get togethers to really put a kink in your plans to eat better.
Almost half of the decisions we need to make on a daily basis are done by habit. By making fewer decisions, our brains look to conserve energy and reduce our overall stress.
When you have a written plan in place, you now have the opportunity to assess how you ate compared to your plan, how this made you feel and adjust your plan moving forward for optimal results.
With a simple plan in place, a quick review will help you see if you ventured off course from your Nutritional Road Map with Taco Tuesday and whether or not that affected your mental and physical performance on Wednesday.
When large groups of people are asked to log their food, researchers find that people tend to eat 15 (or less) different foods over the course of a week. This means that we rarely eat the wide variety of foods to which we have access.
Most people don’t plan their meals in advance and the majority of their meal decisions are guided by their habits.
If you begin practicing planning your meals in advance, you increase the likelihood of influencing / changing your habits related to your meal decisions.
It’s not real sexy…but it is really effective.
Maybe you’ve never planned your meals in advance, or you feel as though your life is too unpredictable for this to work.
Maybe you’ve attempted this before and weren’t impressed with your results.
Your first attempts at walking and talking weren’t that great either. But you kept at it and look at you now!
You have the same potential for improvement with planning your meals in advance.
Click here for our 7 Day Food Journal so you can plan your meals in advance and then at the end of the week, you can see how you did.
Try this for two weeks and see just how much better planning your meals in advance will make you look and feel.