Use this weekly meal planner checklist to plan your weekly diet and stick to it.
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Introduction:
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Planning:
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Read the example meal plan
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Plan your meals in advance
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Tracking:
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Monday
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Tuesday
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Wednesday
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Thursday
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Friday
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Saturday
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Sunday
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Sources:
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Related Checklists:
Introduction:
Process Street - Weekly Meal Planner
Planning your meals and sticking to them is a great way to live a healthy lifestyle, to lose weight, or even to save money!
This checklist is designed to help you plan a weekly meal schedule and stick to it.
You can either use the meal plan provided in the weekly meal planner or build a custom one. You can then follow this plan each day and record whether or not you stuck to the plan.
If you didn't stick to the plan, you record how you strayed from the path of healthy eating.
After running this checklist weekly for a number of weeks, you will be able to see in the template overview tab they days where you are most likely to fail and why.
Identifying the problem is the first step to overcoming it.
Check out this video below for some inspiration!
Gravity Training Zone - How to Stick to a Diet
Planning:
Read the example meal plan
Weekly Meal Plan Inspiration
To help you plan your meals, we've included this example meal plan.
This follows a Paleo diet structure and hopefully gives you some healthy inspiration from which to plan your own.
If you scroll to the end of this plan, we've provided a breakdown and explanation of the paleo diet which you can read to better understand the ideas behind paleo and both its supporters and detractors.
You can follow this meal plan directly, or use the next task to create a custom meal plan of your own.
Once you have a slow cooker, you can set your food cooking and forget about it until it's time to prep! Low effort with high reward!
BigBQ - Slow Cooker Pulled Pork
Tuesday
Breakfast
For some fruity vitamins and some natural sugar to start the day, paleo banana bread has your back.
You can consider adding some lemon curd to it if you're brave... It's better than it sounds, trust me!
Lunch
A big load of blanched/sauteed vegetables. Depending on the time of the year, you could lean toward winter veggies or focus more on the traditional Mediterranean spread.
If you take your life seriously, you'll caramelize those onions!
Snack
Snacks are simple, but they can also hit you with a load of nutrition. Top up your protein with a tin of tuna.
Throw some extra virgin olive oil over it with some loosely diced spring onion and a squeeze of lemon if you want to bring out the fresh bite and salt of the tuna.
The big plus side? With less bread to fill you up, you can eat more bacon!
Snack
Back in the 1800s, the normal bar snack - often provided as a complimentary accompaniment to a drink - was the classic hard-boiled egg.
Even now, in some parts of the world, a hard-boiled egg can be purchased from behind the bar as one would peanuts or crisps. Of course, over time the pickled egg overcame its fresh adversary but there's no reason we can't go against the grain!
Boil a couple of eggs in the morning or the night before and snack on one whenever you feel a little peckish. A little salt and cracked black pepper, and you can't go too far wrong.
For the committed, drizzle some extra virgin olive oil and a dash of sticky balsamic onto the bell pepper halves and grill them until they've softened. Thank me later.
Snack
Okay, we're going to have sweet potato now but we're going to do it a little differently.
Slice the sweet potato thinly and throw it in the toaster. Then mash some avocado with some oil, salt, and pepper and spread it on top.
Pair them with some veg or a salad to round the meal off.
Chicago's Best - Steak and Eggs, The View
Saturday
Breakfast
Keeping the sweet potato vibe, let's start the day with sweet potato hash browns with eggs.
You can scramble the eggs, fry the eggs, poach the eggs, whatever you want!
As long as you enjoy the eggs!
Lunch
Finger food today with a cured meats and vegetable deli board.
Bring back into play the same meats as we had on Friday, plus any extra chicken or steak strips or anything. Bring it all to the table.
Roast off your Mediterranean vegetables, and keep some others raw for dipping into hummus, guacamole, and a range of chutneys.
Remember to buy quality deli meat, not the fake processed stuff you'll find in a regular supermarket aisle. Shop local and visit your nearest charcuterie or butcher if possible.
Granted, that's an easier ask in some parts of the world than it is in others.
Snack
Nuts and seeds are a great way to hit your natural vitamins, fats, and proteins.
Carry a selection of nuts with you. Throw some extra almonds in there, and maybe toast them beforehand if you're feeling a little saucy.
Dinner
I'll throw out some ingredients, you tell me how you feel about them:
Sundried tomatoes. Pesto. Bacon. Meatloaf.
What if I told you it was possible to have all four in the same meal?
This understanding, or perspective, of human dietary history is core to the paleo mindset and methods.
It is grounded in the assumption that for most of - what we can reasonably call - human history, the diet of homo-sapiens has consisted of meat, veg, fruit, and other nuts and seeds. This is the diet of the pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer. This stage of human development is held up as a kind of "default state" of human being - what 17th Century philosophers like Thomas Hobbes may have had in mind when discussing the State of Nature.
Their claims are arguably backed up by certain scientific claims - as the Independent outlines in an in-depth piece from 2015. However, they cite the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition's metastudy into the health benefits and risks of dairy which claims the positives outweigh the negatives.
The paleo diet, whether built on stone or built on sand, does encourage strong consideration of the food we consume and its effects on our bodies. There is an emphasis on organic and sustainable methods with a prioritizing of traditional-wisdom healthy foods and a rejection of foods we already think to be unhealthy.
