With this post, I might be shooting myself in the foot. But that’s OK, because my goal is really to get you the tools you need to see success.
But before I get to the main topic for today, I want to share some feedback from the last post from a reader who works in a cafe. Jamie offers some extra prep tips that we’ll all be thankful for:
“If you prepare garlic in larger amounts it will oxidize and go bitter, make sure to store it in EVOO or enough white white wine vinegar to cover it. The same thing applies to chopped or diced onions, moreso if they are chopped in a food processor. These need to be stored in water to avoid the bitterness. I’ve seen this bitterness ruin a whole pot of Chilli.
Of course, the other thing you can do is prep and freeze your onions. With garlic I’ve found that you can freeze the processed cloves in small ice cube trays for ease of storage and use.”
Thanks for those tips, Jamie!
Back to the topic for today, to be quite honest with you, you might not need a slow-carb meal planner.
Don’t get me wrong; I’d love for you to become a member and even stay with us for a long time. You’ll be really happy with the meal plans, you’ll get some great meal ideas, and perhaps best of all letting someone else plan your food just takes one more thing off your already-full plate.
Maybe you love the idea of planning your own meals but aren’t sure you’d be using the right foods. If that’s the case, this post will definitely help you out.
All the foods
While I was working on the beta version of the slow-carb planner, I came up with what I call the “Fairly Exhaustive Slow-Carb Food List“. In it, there are over 12,000 unique combinations of meals that can be made.
Use it.
If I didn’t have a meal planner at my disposal, that’d be my starting point. Here’s how you can use it to plan a week:
- Open a spreadsheet and put each of the food groups in their own column.
- On a piece of paper, write out the meals you want to plan for, or download my handy meal planning calendar.
- For each column in your spreadsheet, pick a random number from 1 to the amount of items in the list. That’s the number corresponding to the food you’ll use. So for example, using my list, if I pick 20 for protein, I’ll write down mahi mahi. A 17 for veggies gives me cucumbers, a 6 for legumes gives me lentils, and so on.
- Use your list as inspiration for your meal. For mine, I’d probably do a salt/pepper grilled mahi mahi, a cucumber salad (with red onions, salt, pepper, oregano, white wine vinegar, and olive oil), and my standard legume preparation (basically, garlic, onion, chicken stock, and legumes, cooked until al dente). Actually, that sounds pretty good! I’m going to have to add that to the menus.
- Repeat for each meal.
The cool thing about doing it that way is that there’s a good chance you’ll come up with something you don’t normally eat, so you’ll be able to find a new recipe from allrecipes, epicurious, or chowstalker. You’ll be expanding your palate!
Of course, if there are things on the big list you don’t like, simply remove them for your meal planning purposes.
I’ve just given away the farm…
Why did I just give away a tip that would render my slow-carb planner useless? A few reasons. The first is, like I said, my primary goal is to get you learning how to prepare the correct types of meals that will help you reach your health goals. The tools are out there for you to do a little bit of grunt work and plan things on your own.
The second reason is that I know you’re busy, and I think this tip will save you a ton of time. I wanted to share it with you, even if it means you won’t subscribe to the service, to show my appreciation of your being a follower of Finding My Fitness and helping me get to the point of even launching a service like this. That way, if you can’t spare the money or just don’t want to, you’re still able to get the net result with a little less effort than before.
That said, if you subscribe to my idea of automating as much as you can so you can focus on more pressing life issues, I’ve created the slow-carb planner to help you out. The lines, so to speak, will open up with next Thursday’s post. I can’t wait to show you what I’ve got for you!
This is the second in a series I’m putting together over the next couple weeks leading up to the launch of my slow-carb meal planner. With these posts, you’ll be able to do it all yourself. But if you’d prefer that I do it for you, stay tuned for the launch announcement!
Part 1: Make Shopping Easier
Part 2: Make Cooking Easier
photo credit: Liz
Slow-Carb Diet Tips: How To Plan Your Own Meals is a post from: Finding My Fitness