Blogmas Day 10: A little advance planning

Eleanor Roosevelt was a wise woman.In this quote she is reminding me that I can either use up energy sitting on my lovely butt wishing things away or I can use it  planning head and making sure I accomplish things, This can be applied to so many things in our life, whether it comes to finances, career goals or even weight loss goals. Today, I chose to use her wise words and use up some time and energy to plan out a way to find success in the next couple of weeks.

I am officially starting my old new job on Monday. I am beyond excited and looking forward to being a part of that group again. I had such a great experience that it feels like coming back home. The only two downsides is that as I have mentioned before, it tends to be food central. People are extremely social and share a love to making, sharing and eating a ton of food. While most of them are not overweight, I know that this time I will have to make sure that I can stay away from all of it in order not to sabotage all my hard work. I think I will be fine, because I have a plan and I am sticking to it.

I have already decided on having some nuts and some protein for breakfast every day. I will be preparing and packing my lunch at night so that I can't claim lack of time in the morning. I will have time to pack my lunch at night because I will be doing some freezer cooking for dinner meals during the weekend. I will try to have salads, fruits, nuts or something for lunch that can keep me satisfied and on track until dinner.

With the commute downtown, my drive can take anywhere between 50-70 minutes. Add in a few wrecks and it can be a while. Sometimes, stopping to pick something up on the way home seems the easiest and most convenient. While that might be true, for me it is not the smartest thing to do. Fast food and general eating out always triggers me to eat and eat. It doesn't matter what it is, I always end up overeating and/or binging for no apparent reason. Its been a very very long time since I binged. I am not setting myself up for it no matter what.

So armed with my little tools pictured below, I set out to plan out a few make ahead meals that I can either throw in the crockpot or have my BFF throw in the oven or the George when she gets home.

   

 I made these be a protein with veggies and plan to serve with a big salad for myself and some starch for her. I did this last year but most of my recipes included potatoes and some variation of cream of something plus tons of other processed crap. This time I am staying away from that, except for the beef stew that has 4 oz of potatoes per serving.

    

   


I hate cleaning up so I came up with a genius method. I sat a glass bowl on my scale, placed the pre-labeled baggies inside and then tare function was my friend.

                             

         

 I have measured out every component in our dinners so that I know exactly how much of what I will be consuming. By using the crockpot and/or oven, I know that regardless of how slow or fast my drive home is, I will have a nice hot meal within my calorie budget. As I continue to cut out grains, I think I can live with potatoes in my beef stew sporadically over three weeks. So here is what it looked liked during the process:

             

              

                       

    

It took me about one hour to get everything fixed and clean. By pre measuring, I am ensuring portion control and as a bonus I am saving money because there will be no leftovers to dump after a few days. Because lets be honest, we all have dumpled leftovers we had inteded to eat and never got around to! As of tonight, I have three weeks worth of weekday dinners ready in my freezer and a great sense of accomplishment as I continue to trust that having a plan and working on it will continue me down the right path. So, How do you tackle dinnertime? I'd be a mess if I had children!