Meal Planning For Weight Loss #mealplanning #weightloss

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Sometimes I play with the search bar on Pinterest to see what interests people and to help them find what they are looking for if I can. When I typed in meal planning one of the first subheadings to pop up said: “to lose weight”. I know I can help people searching for those terms. For years I’ve struggled with the idea of creating a meal plan that would suit everyone. People have different tastes, goals, and family sizes so it has always seemed like an impossible math equation that I’m never going to figure out. Then I discovered Real Plans and I just knew I had to partner with them. It’s meal planning and prep made simple and with a bit of information from me, which I’ll share below, I’ll help you create a meal plan to lose weight.

How Should You Eat For Weight Loss?

First you have to know that conventional wisdom is false. Take everything you’ve ever learned about weight loss and throw it out the window. Seriously. It’s not about portion control, it’s not about eating low-fat, high protein, eating 6 times a day, juicing, smoothies, or any of the other ideas out there that make primal health coaches cringe. If you can eat real food you can lose weight.

For some with certain medical conditions, like insulin resistance, they may need a bit more fine tuning but the food you eat is responsible for 80% of your body composition. That is, if you have extra body fat it is likely the result of your macros and a history of dieting. Yes. People who go on a calorie restricted diet end up weighing more than people who never go on a diet. When I see someone struggling with weight loss I see someone who has been really good at doing what they’ve been told when it comes to calorie restriction, low-fat products, and artificial sweeteners. While I’m going to cover the basics for you in this article you can read more in my article where I discuss Diet and Exercise: Fact VS Fiction.

The Role Of Insulin And Cortisol In Weight Gain

When you know what works and what doesn’t creating a meal plan to help you lose weight is simple. Two major players in weight loss are insulin and cortisol. A high carbohydrate meal prompts the body to release insulin. Insulin’s job is to store glucose. Glucose is stored in the body as glycogen in the muscle and liver cells. When those storage areas are full the excess glucose gets converted to triglycerides and stored as body fat. Since digestion and the insulin response begin the moment something sweet touches your tongue artificial sweeteners might sound good on paper but they’re really not. It goes like this: you consume and artificial sweetener, insulin is released but the glucose from food never arrives so the glucose in the blood stream is ushered into storage. The body perceives a drop in blood sugar as an emergency, a fight or flight response, and then it will trigger cravings for you to eat more, preferably carbohydrates.

Cortisol is a stress hormone that pulls glucose out of storage and makes it available to the blood. Living as a hunter gatherer this is useful. Imagine walking up on a bear in the woods; a good dose of glucose will fuel the run you’re about to take to get away. The problem is that in today’s world many people are living full-time in their sympathetic, fight-or-flight, cortisol producing side of their nervous system. When you’re continuously stressed your body is pulling glucose from storage and putting it into your blood stream. However, we’re not using that glucose to run away from wild animals. The glucose has to go somewhere because normal blood sugar is 1 teaspoon dissolved in the total blood volume, so the body releases insulin and insulin stores the excess as body fat like as I discussed above.

The other part of the stress and weight loss equation is sleep. How well do you sleep? Do you sleep all night and wake up feeling refreshed? Is your circadian rhythm (cortisol & melatonin) off where you are wide awake at night and then struggle to wake up in the morning? Sometimes simply dialing in your diet will help with your sleep. Changing my diet definitely improved my sleep but it did get worse for about a week before it got better.

How To Create A Meal Plan For Weight Loss:

Dial in your carbohydrate intake. My advice is to track what you’re currently eating for a few days to see where your typical carbohydrate intake falls. If you drastically cut your carbohydrates you’ll likely experience a “carb flu”. When your body no longer has an abundance of carbohydrates to run on it has to revert to other systems such as gluconeogenesis and creating ketones. Both are perfectly natural in the body but your body hasn’t had to rely on them very much because glucose has always been available. While your body is making those systems more efficient it’s normal to feel tired, grumpy, achy, and you’ll possibly have a slight headache. I’ve found that people who stay well hydrated tend to do better during this phase. If you’re looking to make a drastic change I recommend starting on a Thursday if you typically work Monday-Friday. The first day is no big deal. If you’re going to get the carb flu it will likely begin on day 2 which will help keep you from experiencing it at work for at least 2 days.

Some people may need to, or prefer to, dial back their carbohydrate intake gradually. If you’re diabetic, pre-diabetic, pregnant, or taking any medications discuss your decision with your physician before making huge changes to your diet. I don’t know the specific health issues of each of my individual readers so I can’t make a blanket statement for everyone.

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After deciding whether you want to jump straight in or proceed gradually your goal carbohydrate intake for weight loss is between 50 grams – 100 grams of carbohydrates per day. Your spot in that range depends on your level of activity, age, and whether you’re a male or female. (Remember, if you have insulin resistance this may or may not be enough. If you need coaching or want to chat with me for an hour I’m here to help.)

Dial In Your Protein

Is it just me or do people seem to go crazy over protein? Protein shakes, bars, supplements, and people eating hoards of meat “because protein”. This is another one of those areas that make health coaches cringe. Yes, we do need protein but no one really needs to force protein. When you eat too much protein the excess can get stored as body fat.

The amount of protein you need depends on your level of activity and your lean body mass. To determine your lean body mass you take your total weight and subtract the amount of your body weight that is fat. That is the weight you should use to decide your protein intake. Looking at the numbers below you’ll see that a 150 lb person with 30% body fat requires 73.5 grams of protein. One chicken breast and a 1/4 lb hamburger patty is roughly 84 grams. This doesn’t count the eggs they had for breakfast or the protein in the plants they ate. Do you see why I say that people don’t really need to force protein unless there is a special circumstance? The calculation for 105 grams is for larger people, men, and those who exercise heavily.

In the body the conversion of protein to glucose, gluconeogenesis, is demand driven but as individuals we all have a different set of circumstances and tolerances. Initially you may want to track your macros for a week at a time to see how you feel with different levels of protein.

Eat More Vegetables

Everyone knows they should eat more vegetables but somehow this message doesn’t stick. If you have weight loss goals focus on the vegetables that grow above the ground because they will contain fewer carbohydrates.

Root vegetables have a higher carbohydrate content. How much you limit root vegetables depends on your goals. One medium potato with a diameter of 2 1/4 – 3 1/4″ has 37 grams of carbohydrates. If you’re aiming for the middle of the weight loss window (75 grams) on the carbohydrate curve, that is half of a day’s worth of carbohydrates with very little volume or nutrients.

Cronometer.com is my favorite website for tracking the nutrients in the food you eat. Remember though, for some people with compromised digestion, eating something doesn’t always mean that food was absorbed well.

Eat The Right Kinds Of Fat

Go through your kitchen and toss out anything made with vegetable oils. (Corn, Soy, Canola, Cottonseed, Sunflower, and Safflower) These oils contain inflammatory Omega 6’s, they damage your DNA, and inside your fat cells they prevent your body from being able to burn that fat for fuel. If you’ve ever struggled with losing the last 10-15 lbs these oils may be responsible, they make up a large percentage of the American diet. These oils are found in processed foods, some nuts, dried fruits, margarine, shortening, sauces, many other foods, and definitely deep fryers in restaurants.

Instead of vegetable oils use the things your great-grandmother used like lard, tallow, duck fat, and grass-fed butter. Avocado oil is a monounsaturated oil that is great for cooking because it has a high smoke point and it’s essentially flavorless. Olive oil is great but don’t cook with it or heat it because it has a low smoke point and it is broken down easily. Instead, drizzle olive oil over your finished dish. Also make sure that your olive oil is from the United States because other countries sometimes add vegetable oils to their olive oils. Coconut oil is a great source of saturated fat. If you don’t like the coconut flavor buy the refined coconut oil; it doesn’t taste like coconut.

Meal Plans To Help You Lose Weight

You may have just read all of that and thought “great, but how do I do it?” Since everyone has different dietary needs, likes, dislikes, and family sizes, making a food plan that works for everyone is essentially impossible. Then I discovered a service that will solve that problem. It’s called Real Plans.