Why Bother Meal Planning?

This week we are sharing the "Rethink Meal Planning" workshop.

Using the tools of noticing, deciding, and practicing can simplify meal planning, meal prep, and dinner times. 

• Noticing your feelings about meal planning & preparation  
• Focus on decisions that reflect your health goals for the future
•  Acknowledge your energy and mental capacity, understanding that some steps may take more energy than you realize. 

Simple systems that make the best use of your energy and resources can help you live A Vibrant Life.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program

Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Tibbetts, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Hey friends, Using the three tools of noticing, deciding, and practicing can make meal planning, meal prep, and dinner time so much easier. In my coaching program, we talk over and over again about the three steps of notice, decide, and practice. What is really important before you get to decisions is that you are in aligned energy. Notice your energy. Is it aligned or not aligned? Every time we do a rethink, we are going to notice, align, decide, and practice. Notice, What are you thinking? What are you feeling? What do you wanna do? What do you not wanna do? If you are trying to be in the energy where you're smiling with your face and smiling with your soul, that's your aligned energy What do you need to align? Do whatever you need to do. Some people need to walk, some people need a conversation with a friend, and then you wanna make one decision at a time. One prioritized decision with small practice steps. One of the things that I discovered these last five years that I really want to pass down, is the understanding of emotional labor, what it means to hold in your head, in your body, all of the things that are needed to run a home. Most people who follow and listen to me are women and Most women in families are the ones responsible for meals. Meal planning sounds like something simple What's for dinner tonight? The reality is there are so many steps to it and when we created this rethink idea, We realized how it could help you in every area of your life to become self aware. I lived more than four decades with no self awareness. I didn't know what I liked, what I didn't like. When my daughter invented this tool that we're going to share in a bit, she sat with me at the counter and said, mom, you keep saying on your day of rest, that you love going to the dump and I don't think you love going to the dump. I think you love going to the beach. Let's start to notice what it is that you love, like, and what you don't actually like. For today, here are some questions. Notice without judgment. What do you think about planning your meals? Creating your meals, cleaning up, doing all the parts. What do you notice with no judgment? Because I think it's very easy to come with judgment. And so if you can notice without judgment, you're going to get to clarity easier. And then you want to align your energy. If you're already a hundred percent loved, a hundred percent valuable, nothing needs to change. Are you right now in this breath in aligned energy? So an easy way to aligned energy is you close your eyes, you put your hand on your heart, you take two breaths in, one breath out. Often it needs to be a sigh with a little noise. You do that a couple times until you notice, am I closer to aligned energy? And then you want to make a decision. Decide what you want to think about making dinner for yourself and for others. I think one of the most important decisions is you deciding how healthy you want to be 10 years from now. That would be a really great way for you to decide what you want to say yes and no to. And then finally, practice the small improvements, the small action steps. One at a time to at the most. Let's not add 10 new things to our lives. And so maybe you haven't paid attention before to what you think on repeat. The reason I love practical things like meal planning and cleaning a closet is it helps us get to the core of what we actually think about ourselves. Taking something simple and to the side like meal planning might help you notice other thoughts that you have running around in your brain that you haven't noticed. Learning these tools would have been helpful when I was younger, but they are great to know now. Notice, what stage of life are you in? How would you describe it? Are you finding yourself with small kids at home and it's a very busy season of life? Are you finding yourself in an empty nest season? Are you finding yourself having to care for somebody that you love? Just notice that. Notice who you're cooking for and how often do you eat together? Is there anything that you need to be paying attention to? We're just taking a moment to notice. And if you're not currently wanting to notice food because that is not something that you take care of and it's not something that you need to put energy into, you can notice anything. You can notice your physical activity. You can notice the amount of time you're putting into the relationships that are important to you. We just want to take a moment and notice, and I'm giving you some questions that specifically have to do with meals. Use this for anything you want to be noticing. I wish I had this tool when my kids were younger because I would have noticed that I had a lot of activity between the end of the school day and dinner time. And I had never ever given it the attention it deserved. I'm not home to cook. I either needed to prep on the weekends or have my husband cook. All the things I was doing were not working because I never noticed. Once you notice, then you want to say, What do I want to do about what I've noticed? One of the things that all of us need to do is eat food. And if we can create meal plans, we're going to save money. We're going to give out much less energy. The problem that many of the people that I've worked with discovered is few people have high mental energy during that hour when dinner needs to be prepared. When we're thinking about meal planning and meal prepping be honest. What does reality look like today? Not what we're hoping for in the future, not what was, but without any self judgment, just looking honestly at the energy needed for the daily life that you're living. What are you noticing when you think about making dinner five to seven nights a week? Just grab a piece of paper and write down all the things you're thinking. What we want to do then is be deliberate in which thought we keep on repeat. What thought do we want to think about? Preparing dinner about having our family together, whatever it is that's important to you. We want to write that thought down. While you're writing down the things that you're noticing, you may notice some interesting thoughts come up. I know one that came up for me was a thought good moms should always have dinner ready for my three children. That thought was a judgment thought I was a good mom if there was dinner and I was not a good mom, if we had to go through the Wendy's drive through. The reality is I had a limited amount of energy when my children were growing up. I was running out of emotional, mental, physical energy right around the time that dinner needed to be made. And so often the easiest thing was to just choose a drive through. Now, if I had had this information earlier, I would know on the weekend I need to make the plan with my good mental energy and go grocery shopping, prepping, putting everything away, cleaning out the refrigerator again on a day that we weren't incredibly busy. So that might be what you notice. Your energy is already given out to things that are important and you're running out of the energy you need mentally, physically, emotionally. to make the plan for dinner than to go and prepare everything. And there's a lot of steps involved, isn't there, in creating the meals that we want to make. Where are you in this stage of life? I'm now in the empty nest stage. So that's a different amount of food to make. That's a different, amount of people who are home at different times. Maybe you have kids at home. Maybe you have an empty nest. Maybe there are grandchildren coming by. Maybe you, like some of my friends, are making food for your elderly parents or other people. How many people do you need to cook for? What needs to happen, right? Is it fall, winter, summer, or spring? Are you cooking inside or out? If you just took a few minutes, and either just looked at this notice page and had a notebook nearby to answer the questions, I think you're going to find some of the answers that you've been looking for. And so what we really are trying to notice is all the steps involved in feeding the people that you feed. There is the step of thinking about what to make. Then you have to make a grocery list. You have to consider other people's needs. Maybe you like me like to use coupons. You have to actually go grocery shopping. You have to load the food, put it away. There's prep time for each meal, measuring, chopping, cooking. There is also All of the eating, creating leftovers, cleaning up time, right? And so to put into a calendar that dinner is 30 minutes is unrealistic for most people. Then from there, we want to think about, well, what is important for you at this time? What's the reason that you're having dinner at the time you're having it? Is it still based on the idea that six years ago you had, you know, a dance class at four o'clock that no longer happens? It would be so good for each of the days of the week for you to realize where am I now? One of the things that might serve you is the little chart at the bottom of this page. If you could just take a few moments and think about all the steps involved in meals. What do you love to do? For me, I don't mind cleaning out the refrigerator. I don't mind going to the grocery store. I really do like organizing spaces. That's probably the thing I love the most, but there are many things I like. I don't mind cooking, but I don't enjoy it. You know, of course, I enjoy eating and then cleaning up the leftovers, a little less of what I enjoy, doing dishes a little less. But cooking every single day, If I don't guard my thoughts, if I don't manage my mind, that can slip very quickly into the things that I hate. And the problem is once we have a thought on repeat, it's creating feelings in our body. And so as you begin to notice what you're thinking, notice where those thoughts go. Does it help you to think that you love, like, don't mind, dislike, or really hate something? And the good news is there are things that are out of our control, but what we think is always a hundred percent in our control. So now we want to decide what do you want to think about the fact that there are meals to prepare, meals to eat, people to share the food with, right? It is such a gift to be able to have a meal with somebody else. So even if you're in a season of empty nesting or living on your own, are there people that you can invite over on occasion? And then finally, what practices will serve you? Find three to five small practices that we could use on a regular basis. Small steps on a regular basis can move you close to the results that you want. If you decide on Monday nights, we're just going to have something that is a rice bowl salad type thing. Tuesday nights, maybe it'll be a burger or sandwich. Wednesday night could be what sounds fun. All the different things that don't make it into this chart. Thursday night, something like a taco or nacho night and on Friday, maybe something that's pasta. I've given you one month's worth of ideas, but ideally you go to the blank page and you fill it in for yourself. What we're really hoping is for you to take the mental energy that you may not have at five o'clock and invest it on the weekend to create the plan. You know, when you need to clean the refrigerator, when you need to go grocery shopping, when you need to prep the food, at what time of day will you be cooking and cleaning it? When you take the time to invest your energy, when it matches, right, if you're low on mental energy at four o'clock, that's a really hard time to make a plan for the evening. So use the time that you have that serves you best. If your physical energy is early in the morning, that might be when you grocery shop, clean the fridge. If your physical energy is better at night, then make the plan that way do you know what you love? What you like, what's kind of neutral, what you dislike, and what do you detest, and that was so hard for me. I have such a compliant energy, had a problem admitting that I really hated and detested some things. It just didn't seem Christian to me, and working on this chart has changed my life. My rethink chart. A nice easy place to start is with food and meal planning, but you can use this in every area of your life. So if you wanna start with meal planning, here are some examples for me. I love having people in my home. I love that. I love when people are in my home. My husband would not put people in our home in the love category. It's okay for different people to have different thoughts. I like cleaning. I really do. I don't mind doing the dishes. I love organizing. I shouldn't have said just, I love organizing. I like organizing meal plans, so those are slightly different. I don't mind being the sous chef. Like, if someone else wants to cook and they want me to chop, not a problem. Very neutral. Don't mind putting groceries away. Don't have much of an opinion either way. I dislike having to go through the freezer in the pantry and see what we already have. Not really a big fan of that. And I really detest. The actual cooking. I just don't enjoy cooking. I've tried everything, putting on fun music. I do it because it's a responsibility, but I just don't like it. If I had a bunch of money, someone else would cook for me. And I really detest cleaning the refrigerator. It's just one of the things I wish I didn't have to do. So, what are you noticing? Can you come up with one thing for each of those five categories? What is something you love? Maybe if my children were here, they'd say, oh, I love putting on good music and having a glass of wine while I'm cooking. Love that. I like going to the grocery store. I detest having to clean up. Luckily, I enjoy that part so we work well together. Can you name one thing for each of those categories? And we've given you some different ideas of all the things that are involved. You have to go grocery shopping, you have to prepare, you have to cook, you have to clean, you have to spend time washing dry and putting things away. So if you just take one moment, how easy is it for you to notice? This is what I love. I'm kind of neutral. I really, really don't like doing this and I have to do it all the time. That could be why my energy is low. So once you've noticed, you've aligned your energy, let's make a decision. What would your power thought that you want on repeat? Not something you're gaslighting. It would not be very kind and loving for me to say, I love cooking. It's not true. It's possible I can grow into liking it more 100%, but the thought about meal prep and dinner time for me that's powerful is I want to be strong and healthy at 75. Like that is a power thought that drives my decisions and the reason I want to plan my meals and cook healthy food is I want to be eating the kind of food that nourishes me so I can be strong and healthy at 75. What power thought drives your decisions? And try really hard not to choose a thought just because it seems like the right one or the good one, right? Like, how many of us as little children are like, you're so blessed that you're not hungry, there's children starving around the world. If that thought is not aligned, let's not just keep repeating it. Let's find the thought that we want on repeat. And remember, you can always add, it's possible. at the beginning of a new thought to help move you closer to belief. So when my children moved out, it was important for me to create a new power thought like I can adapt to cooking for one or two. It almost felt silly to be cooking without a family because the thought I had was creating that feeling in my body. It wasn't true. My husband and I need to be nourished and it's not best for our budget or our bodies for us to eat out all the time. So it was important to come up with some new thoughts. I can get to a place of appreciating cooking. I can think about dinner plans before 6 p. m. Newer thought for some people. Eggs, leftovers, count as real dinner. Never underestimate the power of your thoughts. This seems like the step we want to skip. It's so important. The most powerful thing you and I have been given the authority to do is decide what thought we want on repeat. And as we repeat it, as it connects to feelings, it becomes a worn neural pathway and it becomes a belief. Many of the beliefs of my life right now are very different than they were 20 years ago. And I'm so thankful for the coaching and the information that I have spent time growing in my own life so that I can have these new thoughts. Okay. Once you notice, What you have chosen to prioritize, if possible, just pick one thing at a time, priority means one, if possible, choose one thing, of all the things you could focus on right now. Spring is coming, could you choose one thing? You want to make sure that there's a vegetable in every dinner. You want to have vegetarian once a week. You want to have people in your home to eat with you once every other week. Whatever it is, pick one thing. And let's see if we can find some small practice steps that could move you in the direction you want to go. So, one of the things I didn't notice when I was a young mom with young children is how much I was trying to just add new things to an already overwhelming, busy life. I wish I'd had just a basic meal plan and I wasn't constantly having to come up with new things. And I wasn't even putting it on me to try new things. I could have kept it so much more simple. So what are you noticing that you would like to decide and just simplify? and do a smaller step that moves you in the right direction. One of the powerful things about our Rethink Weeks is to notice how easy it is to call something one when it's actually five or ten small steps. I'm going to create a spring meal plan. Sounds like one thing, but it's actually a whole bunch of small steps. What do you already have in the pantry? What do you want to decide? Is your night off from cooking? There's so many small steps. So let's try to break down some of the small practice steps. And see if you can decide today what is the best place for you to put your energy. Is it delegating something? Is it deciding not to do something? What I think could be very helpful is to use my name the night dinner planning system just to get some of the mental energy that comes with cooking. If you use this system successfully with your meal plan, you might decide to name the day home care planning system. This is the day I do the laundry. This is the day I go grocery shopping. This is the day I pay my bills. You might bring it to your place of business if you work outside the home for money. Maybe this is the day I have meetings, and this is the day I prepare presentations. If you homeschool your children, you could name the day. This is the day I prepare the lessons. This is the day I correct all the information. Naming the day can serve you in so many areas. We're just gonna Start with this one idea of meal planning. Choose categories and then you're going to fill in the ideas. I'm just giving you a simple idea. What if every Monday night was bowl night? It was either a salad bowl or a rice bowl. Tuesday night was a burger night or a sandwich night. Wednesday night, you get to bring your kids, your friends in and say, Hey, what sounds fun? We're all going to bring something over and share it. You're going to have that meal in person that you're looking for. Thursday night, something Mexican. Friday night, something pasta. You can see how easily you could come up with a four to six to eight week meal plan. And the reason I'm passionate about this right now is we know prices are going to go up so if you could do something like find a sale on ground chicken, and you know you're going to eat it two times over the next six weeks, you're not wasting any money and you're not wasting any time. wHat would you like to decide today? Do you want to plan the next six weeks out for your menus? Is there something simple that you don't have to think about it, it's Monday night, we're having a bowl, it's Tuesday night, we're grilling or having a sandwich. Is there some small step that you could take today that would serve you? Start with noticing, align your energy, make one small decision, and then create your practice steps thank you for joining the live a vibrant life podcast. I hope our time together encouraged you and will equip you with the tools you need to move your life into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose filled life. And if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook. Kelly Tibbetts life coach, or visit my website, kellytibbetts. com. I look forward to connecting again soon.