Mar 28 2012

Tips and Tricks: Healthy Weekly Meal Prep

Healthy eating habits require good time management.

You have to plan. You have to organize. You have to create an efficient system.

Here’s my tips and tricks to prepping a full weeks worth of food in just 2 hours. That’s a total of 42 meals. 6 meals, 7 days a week.

Even if you have great intentions about eating healthy, you have to have a system in place to help you make those intentions a reality. Here’s my tips and tricks to help you get it done. Remember, you cannot exercise off poor choices when it comes to your diet. It’s not about calories in, calories out. It’s about the types of food you eat, when you eat them and how you cook them.

When you are prepared you will be set up for success, even when you inevitably become pressed for time during the week or become too tired to cook. Plan for your success and allow yourself to flourish!

xoxo ~ Cori Ann

Cori’s Personal Weekly Grocery List

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Follow Through

I like to post something about cardio and nutrition at the end of every post because it is important.

Cardio and nutrition are going to be two of the most important parts of achieving your results, no matter what what your goal is. You can not work off your nutritional decisions with exercise. What? You can’t eat a donut, then just do 2 hours of cardio and *poof* it will be like it never happened? That’s what I’m saying. Come on. No. You can’t.

Your body doesn’t work like a simple addition or subtraction problem. It is not calories in vs. calories out. What you eat has a chemical effect on your body. Even if you do cardio to ‘burn it off’ the chemical effect is still present. Different sugars have an affect. Different proteins have an effect. Different fats have an effect. When you take a vitamin, you understand that it has an effect in your body that cardio will not ‘work off,’ right? Food works the same way. Different foods have positive and negative chemical effects within our body. You can’t just work them off.

You have to unlock and unleash the body fat by working with your body in every aspect. Your body works in harmony like a symphony. When one instrument is off, the entire song doesn’t sound right. A good steady drumbeat can’t make up for a guitar that’s out of tune. 2 hours of cardio cannot make up for a donut. Or pizza. Or macaroni and cheese. Or wine and a baguette. Got it?

Cardio

I do a minimum of 45 minutes of stairs with intervals as cardio each and every day. When I’m trying to lose fat I usually do two separate 45 minute cardio sessions a day. Even while I have been recuperating from the car crash, I have still been able to do at least one session of my daily cardio. I love my cardio and I like to stay conditioned. I personally prefer to do a little more cardio than the average figure competitor, then also eat a little more. It takes more time and effort, but I feel the pay off is well worth it. The pay off is that I feel awesome. I feel energized by cardio. I love it.

Post Workout Nutrition

When I was trying to gain muscle I finished every workout with a protein shake, animal protein, and some complex and simple carbs. These are healthy choices for gaining or for performance. These are not the right choices for me for trying to lose fat, define and sculpt muscle. Trying to define and sculpt muscle is different from gaining muscle. This means I need to eat something different.

When I am trying to lose fat and sculpt muscle, I am much more strict with my diet. Only true food sources. No protein powder.

I finish up every workout with lean protein from true food sources (a little red meat, white chicken, white fish and egg whites are best) and some dark green veggies or Super Greens mixed with water only. Again, no protein powder. If you are a vegetarian you would most likely need to supplement with protein powder. If you are not, let me say again that true food sources work best for losing body fat.

Even when I am trying to lose fat, I still FEED my body.

Want more information about nutrition? Check out BPM.tv Nutrition 101.

You can also look at my current personal fat loss diet in order to get ideas on how to develop your own nutrition plan.

Cori Ann’s Prepping Fat Loss Diet:

You can click on the link to my fat loss diet to get details about what works for me, but here is the basic breakdown.

This is my meal plan while I am trying to lose fat and define muscle. My carbohydrates come from complex sources only and are kept to about 100 grams per day.

My sugar is kept at about 18 grams per day. That’s it. That is less than what is in one banana. That means fruit is not in my fat loss nutrition plan. My sugars come from minimal amounts that naturally occur in veggies and in the complex carbs I eat each day. No matter what your goal, I highly recommend you watch your sugar intake, even ‘healthy’ sugar like fruit, and moderate it to a minimum based on your own personal goals.

My protein is kept at about 250 grams per day and comes from high quality, organic, free range (or wild) lean animal sources. My fats are kept at about 40 grams per day and come from my protein and complex carbohydrate choices (not additional plant sources like olive oil, coconut, nuts, or avocado).

That equals about 1800 calories per day. I don’t drop it much lower than that.

I eat natural, organic, whole foods that I cook myself, or if possible I eat them raw. I drink 1 to 2 gallons of water and a couple cups of either coffee or tea. There is no mysterious, magical diet. If you want to lose bodyfat you need to eat a fair amount of lean protein and A LOT of green veggies at every meal. Period.

Did you like this post? Tell me in the comments!

Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments. Don’t be shy! Your comments may help to inspire another. Your questions may help someone else who has the exact same question, but is too shy to ask. I love hearing from you!

Try to come up with a way to make the exercises even more challenging! Try to have better form than me! Let’s inspire each other.

By Cori Ann Lentz • Food & Diet • 6 • Tags: Diet, Food, Gluten free, High protein, Lactose free, Nutrition, Raw, Recipe