Foreign. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to Body and Belonging, where we break free from food guilt, calm down the food noise, and rediscover joy at the table. I'm Jamie, a registered dietitian, and each week we explore the deeper reasons why we struggle with food and why we have such a hard time feeling like we belong in our bodies. I blend gentle nutrition with nervous system awareness, and I teach you biblically rooted health principles to move you away from dieting and restriction and into care and nourishment. So grab a seat at the table and let's dive in. Today is episode number six, feeding your family without spending your whole life thinking about food. Can I get an amen? This episode is for you. If you have ever spent more time worrying about what you're gonna eat versus actually eating. This episode is for you. If you are standing in the kitchen with kids crying at your feet, not knowing what you're gonna cook for dinner. Maybe you've pinned recipes, bought meal planning binders, started plans on Sunday afternoon, and by Wednesday after everything has fallen apart. This is an episode that goes out to all the moms out there eating literal crumbs because the meal or the new recipe didn't work out. And all the kids want is Mac and cheese. Today, I wanna show you a different approach. In fact, this is the approach that I personally have taken for my own family's meal planning for several years now. And it is the approach that I often teach my clients. And I'm gonna give you an inside scoop on it and be sure you stay to because I have a special offer for you if you want to dive deeper into this with my 5 minute meal plan playbook. More to come on that. So this is a different approach. It only takes about five minutes a week and it works for your life, the real life, the life you're actually living. And the best part is it helps you spend less time thinking about food and more time living your life. So there was a time when I would often miss meals because the meals I made for my kids weren't, quote, good enough for me. There was a time where I would plan out every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner and a snack, and then feel like that was a waste of time when by dinner that night, I'm making something that would have been way down the pipeline for later in the week. I've been there, where meal planning became another source of stress instead of supporting my real, actual life. And when I realized that simple is far more sustainable, a lot of things shifted. So the goal here isn't to create a perfect meal plan. The goal here is to create enough structure that your future self feels supported and something that people don't expect. That often happens when they try on this meal plan is they'll find themselves being more creative, trying a new recipe, getting a new idea, and they're like, oh well, the meal plan didn't work because I tried all these new things. And what I share with them is actually the meal plan is exactly what lowered the stress and the overwhelm in your brain long enough that you could tap into curiosity and desire that wasn't there when you couldn't think of anything. So let's talk first about why most meal planning systems fail. Maybe we are planning for our fantasy life instead of our real life. We plan like we're gonna cook from scratch every night and very few people are cooking from scratch every night. Or we forget about church events, we forget about sports practice, we forget about real life exhaustion that sometimes we just don't feel like cooking. Or your meal planning system might have failed because you're starting from scratch every week and reinventing the wheel every time causes decision fatigue. Another reason your meal planning systems may have failed is you think meal planning should feel exciting. Sometimes it just needs to be effective. And you're going to hear me say over and over, start with what already works for your family. Here at Body and Belonging, we start with what already works and we add nourishment. In fact, one of the gentle nutrition principles we talked about last week was an add in mentality of adding in helpful things far before you take away adding a fun night Friday or adding in a new veggie each time you go to the grocery store, adding in something new. This is a great structure in which to put that gentle nutrition principle into place. Some actual tactical examples of what this could look like and we'll do a whole episode on sneaking more produce and more veggies and whatnot into kids someday in the future. But adding beans to your taco meat or just having a fruit free for all available at breakfast, or adding a side salad or adding lentils or millet to soup. When we come at our meal plan with this add in mentality, it honestly is met with less resistance because you're partnering the new, maybe unusual, less familiar foods with family favorites. And where you've gotten your family buy in, it brings more creativity and greater food flexibility. So I highly recommend it. The sweet spot we're finding today is the middle between all or nothing, between color coded perfection, macro, calculated meal plans and I'VE got nothing. Driving through the fast food line, wondering what's her supper. Neither extreme of that spectrum feels good. And this five minute meal plan fits right in the middle. It's flexible, it's realistic, and it's designed from and for real families. You don't need a perfect plan. In fact, I encourage you to take notes today, but make it your own. You need a plan that's easy enough that you actually use. The best meal plan is the meal plan that you actually use. We're gonna go through the exact steps of the five minute meal plan today. Step number one is check your calendar, get a overview, a high level view of your nights. Are you busy? Which nights need easy meals are there, evenings you'll be gone. These are of course things we need to consider. And sometimes looking at our calendar as afterthought, instead of the first step of your week, I'm encouraging that to be your first step. Your schedule determines the complexity of your meal plan more than your nutrition goals. Let me say that again. Your schedule determines the complexity and the capacity that you're gonna have for cooking and for your meal plan more than your nutrition goals. And this is where so many people start at the wrong place. They start with the goals, they start with the macros, they start with the perfect all or nothing plan. But there's no conversation about capacity and about the schedule. And how many nights are you actually going to be in your kitchen and where do you actually do your grocery shopping and the actual capacity and capabilities that you are working within. So step number one is check your calendar. Step number two is choose your meals. Now. Here's my framework. One batch breakfast me. This means whatever I'm making for breakfast on Monday, I'm gonna make a big batch of. I'm not gonna do just one batch of pancakes. I'm gonna triple that batch of pancakes. I'm not gonna make a omelet. I'm gonna make two muffin tins full of egg bites with various vegetables inside. I'm not gonna make a single serve packet of oatmeal. I'm gonna make a huge pot of oatmeal that we can eat on all week. Have some basics for breakfast available, some grab and go, some yogurt. We can always do protein shakes. We always have stuff on hand for that. But I do make a large batch of something on Mondays because that's one of our home days and our weekends are really busy. So whatever you make for breakfast on Monday, make a batch of it and insert whatever day you are home. And you have the time and the capacity to cook a little bit. So batch breakfast is the first part of the meal plan. The second part is one soup or salad of the week. And in my house, when it's soup season, of course, we do a soup basically every week. Usually I do this on Monday as well. Again, that's one of the days I'm generally home and spend more time in the kitchen. You can brain dump, and you can make a whole list of soups that your family enjoys. There's chili, there's stews, there's chicken noodle soup, there's veggie lentil soup, there's minestrone soup. So many options. But one soup per week in the win gives you something to quick heat up for lunches. It gives you something to serve at dinner if it's a night that you don't have time to cook and you haven't used that up for lunches. And it's just a great rhythm to get into. And then in the summer, we do a salad of the week, and I'm talking pasta salad loaded with veggies, tuna noodle salad with peas in it, egg salad to serve on sandwiches or beds of lettuce, or even dipping it with crackers. Chicken salad. This is an easy go to lunch, especially for work days. Or this could be a dinner meal if we needed it. Or it's just there. If, like, my husband gets home late and needs to eat something, it's prepped, it's in the fridge. And most of those things, like a good pasta salad with lots of veggies, the longer those veggies marinate in that. I use the Olive Garden Italian dressing. The longer the veggies marinate in that in your fridge, the more delicious they become. So this is gonna last all week. We're not worried about it going bad or spoiling. And it's just a great habit to get into at last, the entire week. So we've batched breakfast. We have a soup or a salad for lunches. And then I have found three dinner ideas to be the sweet spot in our house. Again, huge fan of leftovers, huge fan of cooking in batches. We go out to eat every once in a while, or we spontaneously decide to cook something different, or my daughter wants to try a recipe from her cookbook. So if I have generally planned on three dinner ideas and I have the groceries or I have the pantry staples to cook those, that gives me enough to work off of it for the week. Now, a bonus tip for you that will be in the five Minute Meal Plan Playbook is going with theme nights. And this is a hack that actually helps you think more broadly. Because if I tell you, hey, name 10 dinner ideas, you're gonna struggle. If I give you a category like Taco Tuesday, you're gonna say, oh, well, under that category of Taco Tuesday, we've got tacos, we've got nachos, we've got quesadillas, fajitas, beef burritos, chicken burritos, bean burritos. Oh, goodness. All of a sudden you thought of almost. So for some families, the concept of theme nights works great. Macaroni Monday, Taco Tuesday, One Pot Wonders on Wednesday, Fun Night Friday. These are things you could consider and play around with for your family. And at a minimum, it'll help you brainstorm some new meal ideas and give you some meal ideas that already work for my family. That's in the playbook I'm going to tell you about at the end of today. Repetition is your friend. Especially if you're in a season like me, of busy schedules and little kids. I fewer choices actually creates more peace and more room for creativity. Step number three is prep Ahead. Anything that you can. Chop vegetables. Cook rice ahead. Thaw meat early. Wash your produce. In fact, I highly recommend that you prep as you put away as you finish your grocery shopping. These small acts of preparation create huge amounts of mental relief. Not to mention who wants to wash their chopping board and their knife every single meal? No, no, no, no, no. The more you can patch that booger, the better. Step number four is create your grocery list. Shop your pantry first. Use what you already have first. Avoid buying ingredients for seven brand new recipes. Hold yourself back to one new recipe a week at most. Now, I do want you to have a place that you put your recipes that you want to try. Because I don't know about you, but I've often thought self I want to try a new recipe. Let me go start browsing Pinterest. And 45 minutes goes by and I am still no closer to choosing the recipe I'm going to try. So decide right now if you're a Pinterest person, if you actually like paper book cookbooks. Or for example, I've got a skylight calendar and so I really like that I can just take a picture of a recipe. Maybe I get a cookbook from the library and then I take pictures of the recipes and it uploads it to the Skylight Calend calendar and then they're there when I'm ready to try a new recipe, it's saved. So just decide right now where you're going to hold the recipes you want to try. But do hold yourself Back to like 1 new recipe A week at most. I think we underestimate the mental burden that it is to try a new recipe. There may be new cooking skills involved. There is a risk of failure, there is a risk of it not turning it out, There's a risk of it being costly. If you have spent money on specialty ingredients and it doesn't turn out, your kids don't like it. And so you need to have a certain amount of capacity for all of that in order to try a new thing. So that's why I say one a week, make it a thing, or even one a month. Even if you only did one a month, that would be 12 new recipes after a year, which is awesome and fantastic. So just a little like buffer to some overexcitement in that category. And step number five is enjoy. This is the step most people skip. Close the mental tab, stop replanning all week, trust the plan you made and jot down any new ideas for when you do next week's meal plan. I do want to touch on one more thing as we get closer to wrapping up and that is we consciously or unconsciously carry so much guilt and pressure around food. It's my hope and my prayer that this framework offers relief, offers simplicity, offers you a in between from feeling like you needed to do the all or nothing plans, not another system to master. I want you to customize it to meals that already work for your family. I want it to feel like a breath of fresh air. God didn't ask us to manage our homes through perfection. He invites us into faithful care and faithful stewardship. And thinking about food a little bit at the beginning of the week so that you can think about food so much less all week long. I see that as faithful stewardship of your family, of your kitchen, of your budget, of your food, and of your nourishment. Meal planning isn't about earning health. It's about crafting a rhythm that helps you care for yourselves, helps you tend to your family, helps you meet your needs so that you can do whatever it is that you are called to go out and do in this world. So that's my five minute meal plan. If this conversation felt like a breath of fresh air, I made something for you. I created a five minute meal planning playbook. It's just a five page PDF for you to download and print off that goes through this exact framework in more detail. It includes a simple weekly planning guide that you could laminate or make copies of. It has meal planning prompts and some of those theme night ideas and some meals that already work in my rotation pretty often. I will link it below for you. I've got it 50 off right now so it's only $7 or about the cost of a cup of coffee these days and that just helps support the infrastructure of my email list and this podcast host and the things that cost me each month in order to provide the support for you. So go grab that. The link is going to be in the show notes for you and I think it really will bless you. I can't wait to hear what you think. My encouragement for you this week is spend five minutes planning this week and notice how much mental energy it frees up. You do not have to become the perfect meal planner. You don't have to love cooking. You don't have to think about food all day long. You can start with what already works, add nourishment where you can and trust that small, consistent actions matter. I will see you next week week. Hey, if this podcast resonated with you, would you consider leaving a review? It helps other people find this podcast. Also make sure you hop on my email list. I will link that down in the show notes as well. It's where I send out weekly Tuesday tips, new podcast episode announcements and other things that I think will bless you. Thanks so much Sa.