Meal Plan: Week Two

For this past week, we worked on just slightly expanding upon last week's concepts. It can often take more than one week to really develop good consistency with 'Basic Balance' and proper meal frequency. Therefore, we still kept this as an important focus, but also introduced a new helpful tool in beginning to manage hunger and portion control. For most of us, our many responsibilities and hectic schedules make it difficult for us to really get in touch with or pay attention to our actual biological needs for food. Because of this, we worked on implementing what we like to call a "hunger scale" before and after each meal. By doing this, Michael can start to become more aware of either how hungry he is or how full he gets. The idea is to avoid extremes on the scale by never letting yourself get too famished and not eating until you are stuffed full. This can definitely help portion control, and maintaining balanced meal frequency will help avoid the extremes, but also important is the awareness it creates about how you use and actually need food.

Michael's also still working on meal planning and preparation using the 'Master Food List' we created last week. Finally, in our most recent nutrition session, we discussed and worked on reading food labels properly. Food companies are the ultimate "masters of disguise", as they use eye-catching packaging, and trigger words like "fat free", "heart healthy", "No trans fats", "all natural", "nutritious", "essential vitamins and minerals", "Dr. approved" , and more, to get you to buy their product. Plus, they manipulate things like the serving size to work around FDA guidelines in order to classify there product a certain way. There are too many examples of this to even mention, but the important thing as consumers is to be armed with the right information to read between the lines in order to make the best choices. With Michael, we focused on cutting through the clutter to select the best products based on the right percentages of proteins, carbs and fats in comparison to the total calories per serving, and how to look for the products with the highest quality ingredients. Along with the work we've already done on the Master Food List, these tools will hopefully aid him in making the right choices where it counts first - at the grocery store. The better choices you make up front and bring into your home, the easier it is to avoid tempation, because the bad foods simply aren't there for quick accessibility. I know it's a simple concept, but I also know that most of us often look for complicated solutions to our problems, when we are often overlooking that one simple answer that would stop it from becoming a problem in the first place. Just some 'food' for thought. Next week we will address some additional items, so stay tuned...