We can all be good and virtuous with our food choices when we have lots of time and headspace to plan and prepare our super healthy and nutritious meals and snacks, but what happens when normal life gets in the way? When you find yourself dashing from work to the gym, getting held up in meetings or stuck in traffic, taking the kids to the umpteenth activity that week, when you’ve got cleaning and shopping and a whole host of other jobs to do, what happens then? It becomes very easy for our food choices to slip off the bottom of our list of priorities doesn’t it? And how does it make you feel when that happens? Pretty crappy hey?
You might feel disappointed in yourself, weak-willed, guilty even and then your health and your body might start to show the signs, which further adds to the those miserable feelings. Well first of all, stop that thought train right now and just know that you are only human, trying to juggle a million different things at once and know that it’s not always that easy. However, also know that you ARE capable of making those changes and making them stick if you are prepared to put in just a little bit of effort.
Change won’t happen on it’s own, you need to force it and initially you may need to front load a little bit of effort, but once you do, it really can be possible to maintain a healthy diet alongside a busy life and the key to it all is simply PLANNING and PREPARATION.
So start each week by checking your diary and working out what meals you need.
Next plan those meals and shop for the ingredients.
You’re half way there – you already have everything you need to fulfil your goals, all you need to do now is put it together.
If you know you’re not going to have much time through the week, prepare what you can ahead of time. This might be making a batch of snacks to see you through the week, cooking up some granola for breakfasts or doing meal prep the night before or early in the morning before you go to work.
Always batch cook anything that will freeze or keep so that you can build a stock pile of delicious, healthy ready meals and snacks.
Seem like a lot of effort? Then consider how much time you currently spend deciding what you’re going to make for dinner, shopping for last minute missing ingredients, slapping a half hearted meal together because you’re too goddam starving to wait for anything decent… Then consider the alternative, spending a little time once a week to save you time and help you make the right choices, CONSISTENTLY. Once you get into a rolling system you can save yourself untold amounts of time and negative feelings and ultimately reach your health and body goals, so go for it – GET PLANNING!!
