After signing up for an Ironman, I knew that this had to change immediately. Between work, life, and training, I knew if my husband and I wanted to avoid hangry meltdowns and nonstop takeout, meal planning had to happen. Here's how I finally made it work, and stuck with it.
Failure Bred Success
When my now-husband, Lucien, and I registered for Ironman Mt. Tremblant
two summers ago, we were training for a couple Half Ironman races and
preparing for our wedding. To say it was a busy time is an
understatement. I wrote off meal planning as just one more thing to do,
and told myself I didn't have time for it.
Huge mistake. In short, dinnertime was a constant disaster and rarely
satisfying. Most nights it was a last-minute rush to throw something
together. Other nights felt like total defeat as we resorted to pizza or
Chipotle. As we headed into Ironman training this year, we both knew it
was time to make meal planning a priority — for the sake of our hungry
stomachs and our marriage.
The Plan That Worked for Us
What do we need meal planning to help us accomplish? Answering
that question was our first order of business. As it turns out, it was
the easiest to tackle. For starters, we wanted to avoid a repeat of last
summer.
Outside of work, nearly all of our energy was getting dumped into
training. I remember the first time I heard that it wasn't uncommon for
Michael Phelps to eat upwards to 10,000 calories a day; I just couldn't
wrap my head around it. One Ironman later and I totally get it! We
certainly weren't eating that much, but our caloric needs were much
higher than normal. Food was our fuel, so the core of our plan had to be
about functional cooking and eating. We needed an arsenal of healthy
and satisfying meals and snacks to carry us through the whole day — from
breakfast to bedtime.
Since everything else in life was happening on a schedule, I felt like
it was also the most logical way to approach meal planning. From there, a
three-pronged approach to meal planning was put in place. Our goal was
to make it sustainable and to ensure it worked for us.
Step 1: Plan (and Then Test, Adjust, and Plan Again)
I happily took the reigns on this step — and my husband was just as happy to let them go.
For starters, I created a bank of recipes we could draw on each week. It
was a roster of dinners we'd cooked enough times that we didn't need to
look at a recipe to make them happen. These meals were anything but
sexy or adventurous. Full of lots of chicken, sweet potatoes, and all
the green vegetables, they were purely functional.
But there was already a flaw in the plan: I thought only about dinner.
It took a couple weeks of grazing throughout the morning because
breakfast wasn't quite filling enough and an equally sorry state of
affairs after trying to wing lunch that we had to expand the plan.
Seeing how easily daytime meals fell apart when there wasn't a plan in
place was a wake-up call for how important thorough planning would be if
we were to stay on track. Each week I chose the dinner recipes for the
week ahead and made a list of the items we'd need for breakfasts,
lunches, and snacks.
The big takeaway here was the expansion of meal planning to all the
meals of the day. It took some failure to realize we needed to tackle
more than dinner, but we got there. From there we established a bank of
recipes to draw upon for dinner and a pantry of ingredients to help us
make smart breakfasts and lunches.
