Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Last time, I spoke about strategies for eating out. If you can, eating in is always ideal. Why? Because you have complete control over your food and the way you prepare it. The number one complaint I hear from clients is that they just don’t have the time to plan and prepare healthy meals at home. Here are a few resources that might help, ranked from “I love to cook!” to “Keep me the heck away from the kitchen.” The bottom line is, whatever you choose, it must fit into your lifestyle to make it stick as a healthy habit.
Clean Eating Magazine
Clean Eating Magazine focuses on providing you with the tools you need to consume food in its most natural state. It’s like having your very own dietitian, cookbook, and instruction manual rolled into one magazine. Each issue contains tools (meal plans, shopping lists), tips, facts, tricks, and advice you need to get started on your clean-eating lifestyle. You can check out an issue anywhere magazines are sold for under $6, or a subscription is $19.97 for six issues.
This website offers a weekly meal planning service for a small fee (3 months is $9.95.) This would be ideal if you want to do all the purchasing and preparing, but get hung up on the “what’s for dinner?” question each night. I recommend their Heart Healthy menu, but they provide some others as well such as kosher, vegetarian, and more.
CalorieKing.com
If you’re trying to watch your waistline, I think Calorie King is one of the best online resources out there. With its comprehensive database of grocery and restaurant foods and easy-to-use interface, food logging is about as simple as it gets. An annual subscription is $75. Your subscription includes sample meal plans based on your personal calorie targets, as well as a recipe book. It’s not just any old recipe book though – you can easily search for recipes and that meet your caloric and nutritional requirements, and then add them directly to your food diary.
Dream Dinners
Dream Dinners provides you with everything you need to assemble dinners for your family, store in your freezer, and serve in the weeks ahead. Dream Dinners supplies all of the essentials from easy to follow recipes to fresh, pre-cut ingredients. You visit their store, assemble your meals, put them in the freezer, and bring them out to heat as needed. Available menus are rotated on a monthly basis, and usually include several “Heart Healthy” options to choose from. Dream Dinners has both a Roswell and Cumming location. Six-serving meals run between $20 and $30 each.
Fresh ‘n Fit
For those who just don’t want to mess with cooking period, but don’t want to eat out, this is the solution for you. Fresh ‘n Fit offers complete meal preparation. All meals are prepared locally and are cooked without any artificial colors, added preservatives, or trans fats. Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner are provided for under $20 per day.
Committed to Your Health,
Elaina Smith