Meal Planning

What is the easiest way to meal plan? What I mean is do you program everything in myfitnesspal ahead of time to see what options will work for that day? Like I need to get more strict and I have only sort of been meal planning but I want to make sure I don't eat to many carbs in one day etc. I just wondered if someone had an idea of some ways to do this. I mean I know what I can eat it is just how to know what to eat on the same day etc. I hope this made sense.

Any ideas would be great

Thanks

Chenoa

I see where you are headed with this and its a good idea, especially plugging it all into MyFitnessPal and seeing where you might end up. You would just have to remember to update it. I don't really plan that way. I really focus on eating pretty much the same breakfast every day or I have a few go tos. Then my lunch is usually left over from my dinner the night before. My dinners I plan usually the day of and I focus on the protein.

Not an ideal approach and certainly not what you were looking for, but I am not shooting to specifically hit the 600-800 calories per day. I want to be in the ball park, some days are 500 and some days are 1000, but my focus is always on high protein and low carb.

What I have done - long term pre-op, post-op and in maintenance, is to look at things midday and see what needs to be done to meet my daily goals; if I had an idea of what dinner would be, then I would log that in (and make corrections after the fact.) Some of my midday meals may be somewhat pre-determined by other activities (out on the run, need to work around a session at the gym, etc.)

Protein, of course, is typically the first thing I would look at, then I look at the amount of fruits and veg and between the two I could see if dinner needed to be more protein or veg biased, and what might be useful in any remaining snacks for the day. I also look at a couple of select micronutrients such as calcium (do I need to take a/another supplement today?) and potassium (not much we can normally do to supplement that, but maybe a can of V8, but I like to keep on top of it.) Carbs can certainly be taken into account if that is on your radar (they weren't for me, other than hitting certain minimums for some select meals,) as can any other factor that is of concern for whatever phase one is in - minimum level of fats to ensure proper vitamin absorption is one of my targets these days.