Having a food plan

Dinner Diva column by Leanne Ely

Last Wednesday on my radio show, a listener was asking me questions about nutrition. I answered them as best I could, and her reply was incredible. She said, “Perhaps laying out our food for the next day is just as important as laying out our clothes.” Not an exact quote, but close enough. I thought, “What a powerful statement!”

Yes, it is! She’s absolutely right. When we follow a set evening routine so we can be as well prepared as possible for the next day, we are way more successful in our work the next day. We glance at our calendars to see our appointments for the following day so we can get our mind around what we have to do. We lay our clothes out; we lock the doors, brush our teeth and go to bed. Ta da … evening routine is done. But what if we added to that a cursory look at our refrigerators, laid out our food to take to work the next day and actually planned our next food move? Know what I mean?

Instead of allowing ourselves to just go with the flow foodwise, we instead plan our food for the day and then get it ready to go; whether that’s putting food out on the counter in baggies, throwing it in a cooler or putting it all together on a shelf in the fridge to make it quick to pack the next morning. Having a plan and working that plan makes it so much easier!

Left to our own devices, we can be very much like spoiled children. We want what we want when we want it. We’re unwilling to wait and are impatient as all get out, especially when our blood sugars are in our shoes! You know that feeling, don’t you? You’re starving and willing to eat just about anything, as long as it’s quick!

But after you eat whatever it is that you’ve fallen prey to, there’s the guilt, the remorse and the thought that you could have done better. We all know that feeling. It’s only good for the first few minutes you’re eating it, then there is dealing with the aftermath of knowing you did your body absolutely no good and maybe even damaged yourself. Why do we do this?

The answer is simple — we lack a plan! If we had the plan and we used it, it would look so much different! Life is so much simpler when we have worked the details out ahead of time. This is why we get ourselves in order the night before. Otherwise, our lives become too crazy, and we’re always trying to play catch up. We hear ourselves telling our children and everyone else around us to hurry up, we have to go. The clutter of living in that kind of hurried chaos gets everywhere — our homes, cars, lives … even our backsides!

This is summer — we have the bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables from farmer’s markets and local gardens everywhere. How about incorporating some of that good stuff into your food plan? Use what is local and fresh (and also cheaper!) to get the nutrition in. Having healthy, quality foods as a part of our lives means there is less room from the stuff that can hurt us.

Eating well is all about loving ourselves. Loving ourselves is expressed in dozens of ways and laying out our food for the day is one terrific way of doing just that.

For more help putting dinner on your table, check out Leanne’s website, www.SavingDinner.com, or her Saving Dinner book series (Ballantine) and her New York Times bestselling book Body Clutter (Fireside). Copyright 2008 Leanne Ely. Used by permission in this publication.