If you struggle to balance your busy day-to-day with planning and creating healthy meals for yourself or your family, you’re not alone! One of the greatest challenges our clients face, especially when making dietary changes, is feeling overwhelmed by the time it takes to plan weekly menus and meals. We’re sharing the many benefits of meal planning, and what to expect.
And let’s be real. Meal planning is not really that much fun for most people. For so many, it’s just not happening. This can lead to too many times through the drive-through, grabbing unhealthy take-out, skipping meals altogether, and generally just not nourishing yourself well.
And yet this tool is incredibly powerful and transformational, for your health and for your life. It’s very difficult to eat healthfully without a plan!
You already know the obvious benefits of meal planning, such as saving time and money, keeping you organized and on track, but what about some of the less obvious benefits?
If you ever find yourself in a constant state of decision-making about food, it’s easy to start obsessing. When planning weekly meals, you can take an hour out of your week to make your decisions around food and be done with it!
When you’re spending a lot of time and energy worrying about your food choices, chances are you don’t have a plan. This creates a lot of stress! Stress is already toxic, but if you’re stressing about food, not knowing what to make, and falling into bad choices out of convenience, you’re just heaping bad on top of bad for your health.
Stress is a big contributor to emotional eating. Reduce stress, reduce emotional eating! If you feel out of control, overeat or binge eat, this is much more likely to happen without a plan. Planning helps you take back control.
You have more time and energy for the things that light you up because you’ve gained time throughout the week by planning and shopping only once.
A plan creates a structure with built-in options that SUPPORT YOUR GOALS. You don’t have to spend time and energy making decisions around what to eat, or what you should or shouldn’t eat. You’ve already thoughtfully made these decisions.
Planning healthy meals gets you into a routine of eating healthy food, three meals a day.
Food tastes better the less stressed you are when preparing it. When you have a plan and the ingredients on hand, you can relax while preparing your meal and are happier when you sit down to eat it. This is key for optimal digestion and absorption of all your nutrients!
At our functional medicine practice, we believe in cooking as a lifestyle practice to maintain vibrant health. Cooking provides nourishment on so many levels. Unfortunately, it’s no longer a priority for many people. Due, in large part, to the time it takes to search for healthy recipes and make a plan. People simply get overwhelmed.
We want to be part of the solution. We want to give people the tools they need to change their health for the better. It is relatively easy to follow through with the cooking part when you have a plan.
When your meals are planned properly, eating healthy and feeling nourished becomes simple and fun. You start to achieve the health goals you’ve wanted.
We encourage all of our patients to take the time to plan out meals. If you’re struggling, we want to help!
This is why we’re offering a custom Nutrition Planning service to help you make it happen.
Our health coaches will work with you one-on-one to define your goals, learn about your food preferences and dietary restrictions, then create a meal plan you’re excited about! It will be a plan that’s easy to stick to because it’s delicious and designed specifically to your tastes and lifestyle.
Our meal plans support the pillars in our Fully Functional® process for getting you feeling your very best. All plans reduce triggers for inflammation and dysfunction by removing gluten, dairy, and other inflammatory ingredients. These delicious recipes help detoxify the body and support the immune system with clean, whole-food ingredients.
Start feeling the benefits of meal planning, and book an appointment by clicking here, or please call us at (317) 989-8463 on Monday-Thursday, from 8AM – 5PM Eastern time to speak with one of our amazing health coaches.
Schedule an Appointment Today.
The Center for Fully Functional Health® is led by a team of award-winning, internationally recognized physicians, committed to providing personalized, life-changing care.
