Conquer Your Weight

Dr. Sarah Stombaugh: Before we get into the episode, I am thrilled to announce we are launching an online course, The GLP Guide. The GLP guide is a must have resource for patients who have been prescribed any of the GLP medications such as Wegovy, Ozempic, semaglutide, Zepbound, Mounjaro, tirzepatide, Saxenda, liraglutide. There are a lot of them and this course is available for anyone to purchase. We often hear from people who haven't been given much information about their GLP medications. No one has told them how to handle side effects, what nutrition recommendations they should follow, or what to expect in the longterm. And it can be really intimidating and simply frustrating to feel like you're alone in your weight loss journey. With the GLP guide, you'll get access to all of the answers to the most common questions for patients using GLP medications, not sure how to use your pen, struggling with nausea, wondering how to travel with your medications. We've got you covered for only $97 for one year access. This is an opportunity you do not want to miss. The course is launching on October 1st. For more information and sign up, please visit www.sarahstombaughmd.com/glp. You don't have to be on this journey alone. We are here to guide you. And now for today's episode, this is Dr. Sarah Stombaugh and you are listening to the Conquer Your Weight podcast. Announcer: Welcome to the Conquer Your Weight podcast, where you will learn to understand your mind and body so you can achieve long-term weight loss. Here's your host, obesity medicine physician and life coach, Dr. Sarah Stombaugh. Dr. Sarah Stombaugh: Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the Conquer Your Weight podcast. I am really excited to talk about meal planning, meal preparation, and how to just simplify and streamline that process. So we are going to dive into that in a minute, but what I'm most excited about is this is actually a question that came from one of our listeners and if you listen to last week's episode, you heard the invitation where I said, if you have a topic that you would love to hear me talk about that I have not yet addressed in the podcast, please reach out and let me know. And I certainly want to extend that offer. Whether you're listening to this episode live when it goes live in November of 2024, or even if you're listening to it at some point in the future, that offer always stands. So if you've been listening to the podcast and you're like, I cannot believe Dr. Stombaugh has not addressed x, y, z topic, reach out, send us an email info@sarahstombaughmd.com and I would love to create a podcast episode just for you. This has been a project that I've been working on for a while now, and I've had this realization that there are some really big gaps I talk about early on, we went through some of the basics and then we've gone through topics as they come up. But I've realized, oh my gosh, I can't believe last week I hadn't talked about orthopedic surgery or next week I'm really excited about an episode about eating disorders and weight loss, specifically if you have a history of restrictive eating disorder. So we're talking about some of these things that come up very commonly in my practice, but yet somehow I have not done an episode on them. So with that, let's dive into today's episode about simplifying meal planning, meal prep, and how to do that in your busy life. Now, I have to imagine that this will apply to everybody. There are different circumstances by which your life might feel kind of hectic or crazy or challenging to do meal planning, meal preparation, and I want you to take the pieces of this that make the most sense for you and apply them to your own life. So let's talk about this because whether you are a working mother of young children, whether you are a single adult who just has a busy career, whether you have other priorities and maybe you hate cooking, you hate meal planning and preparation, how do we take these things and align it with your health and weight loss goals? So I'm going to give you some strategies and I'm actually going to share, I don't know if recipes is the right word, but recipe or meal ideas of things that we eat to keep our life very simple. Now, if you are new to this podcast, you may not know, but most of my listeners will know. I have young children. My children are two years old, four years old and six years old, at least at the time of this recording. And I am in private practice. My husband works full-time in a very demanding job, works a lot of nights, works a lot of weekends, and so it is very common that I am the primary meal planner and prepper in our household, and I actually really enjoy that role. But you can imagine some of you might also be in the situation that doing that at dinnertime when my husband's still working, I've got the kids running around, it can be crazy. And so meal planning, meal preparation, making this really important in my own life for my own family and our health goals, but then also sharing this with my patients and with my listeners. So my best recommendation for you is to just make it simple. Now, when I talk about making simple, it doesn't necessarily have to mean a specific recipe that is simple, but what I would like to offer to you is that sitting down to evaluate, okay, how many meals per week do I actually need to cook? How many times do we like to eat out or eat on the go versus how many times are we eating at home? And a lot of times we come home from work, it's five or six o'clock and it's like, oh, what am I going to make for dinner? That position where we're both now pressed for time, maybe we're also already hungry, is a really challenging position to be in mentally to make the decisions that are best in line with your food goals At that time, you're most likely to order takeout. You're most likely to just pull out the frozen chicken nuggets from the freezer. And so the best recommendation that I have for you is to dedicate a little bit of time to planning and preparation. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be a huge amount of time dedicated every week. I think there's often this idea that we need to have all this excitement and try new recipes. And while that is great, and I'm saying this from someone who actually really loves cooking, trying new recipes, trying new anything in your life takes more mental effort compared to just doing something that we know really, really well. So what I would like you to do first of all, is take a look at what am I already doing? What are the meals that I enjoy that I can make that are really in line with my health goals that are easy? What are those? Because you might find that you already have a handful of recipes that are sort of your go-tos. I would like you to either narrow that list down to about 10. That can be a little bit more, a little more or a little less than 10, but about 10 plus or minus. And if your list is larger than 10, I want you to bring it down to 10. If it's less than 10, you might decide to bring it up to 10. But having some really go to, again, I'm going to say recipes, but I really mean meal options that can be made quickly, simply, maybe easily double the batch for example. So here's a couple of rules for you. One, I want you to have about 10 recipes that are your go-to recipes for your family. These are things that someone in your family knows how to prepare that have readily available ingredients that can be purchased at the grocery store or maybe even kept in your pantry to be eaten on an ongoing basis. This is something that is going to be in line with the amount of time that you have thinking about are there opportunities for preparing things in advance, opportunities for buying things that are pre-cooked? Are there opportunities for doubling a batch or tripling a batch of something? You might have a recipe that is moderately complicated, for example, or maybe not even moderately complicated, but let's say it takes you 45 minutes of pretty intensive, like I'm all focused on chopping and measuring these ingredients and it takes a lot of time to prepare that. But what happens if you take that recipe and you triple it? Can you freeze it for separate meals? Can you eat it on multiple occasions? So I want you to keep some of that stuff in the back of your mind and I want to talk to some of recipes or meal options that we turn to very frequently in our family that may also be in line with your goals. So one of my favorite things to make is fajita bowls. So this is something that could be made with meat, without meat depending on your preferences. What I love to do is take frozen chicken breast. We buy just a gigantic bag of frozen chicken breast at Costco and always have that living in our freezer. And one of the easiest things that I can make is shredded chicken in the crockpot. And so what this looks like is in the morning I literally will throw in three to five chicken breasts depending on how big of a batch I want to make a couple of bags of frozen sliced peppers and onions, dump that on, and then a pre-made packet of fajita seasoning. Last week when I made this, we were out of it. I had some taco seasoning, so I used that instead. If you don't have that, you could use cumin, you could use chili powder and sort of make your own combination, but literally frozen chicken breast, frozen pre-sliced vegetables and a bag or a packet of the McCormick's taco seasoning, fajita seasoning, something like that, dump it on, put the lid on, heat it on low, and that becomes the basis for this and then potentially even other meals. So then that just cooks all day long in the evening it's been cooking for eight hours. That has a lot of flexibility, so it's probably ready after six, but you can keep cooking it longer. You can cook it for eight hours, you can cook it for 10 hours if you want to throw in a little bit more flavor, you can even use chicken thighs to have a little bit more fat depending on your health goals. And then that can be something you put over a bed of rice with black beans and salsa and avocado and sour cream, or you can substitute sour cream for Greek yogurt to have lower fat and higher protein, and you can even buy instead of, I love avocados, but it's so tricky to get an avocado that is going to be ripe on the day that you are planning to eat that avocado. And so for example, I've recently taken to the little prepackaged avocado mash or the Costco individual, I think they call 'em guacamole, but it really seems more like a mashed avocado. But is that something that you could then just sort of assemble or if you want to eat it on a bed of lettuce or if you want to roll that up in a tortilla and for young children even or for whoever you're trying to feed, this can be separated into components where there's chicken, there's beans there. Maybe you have chips on the side that can be eaten with or eaten with guacamole, for example. And can that meal be sort of tailored to you and your family and what your preferences are and what your health goals are? Similarly, a lot of times we may make something like an Asian bowl, and so that may have a very similar put onto a bed of rice and then have a roasted broccoli along with a precooked chicken, for example, with just Asian dressing on it. And that could be like a peanut dressing or a soy-based dressing, for example, something that's going to be lower in sugar. Teriyaki can be okay, but just making sure some of the teriyaki sauces have a lot of added sugar, so just being really intentional about that. Or even the precooked at Costco in the refrigerated section. I'm a huge Costco addict if you didn't know that. But in the refrigerated section there are sort of heat and eat meals that are different curries or dishes like that that could be really well paired onto a bed of rice. Is that something that then could be eaten? We love serving something like that with a side of edamame. Edamame is a great, it's a vegetable, but of course it is soy, so has a lot of protein in it as well. My kids call them squishy beans, and so I may refer to them as squishy beans, but super easy edamame. We almost always have that living in our freezer and so on. A busy night can be something like, Hey, we bust out this precooked chicken curry dish, for example, that's heated on the stove top for five minutes. We've got some rice going in the rice cooker or maybe even Uncle Ben's 90 second rice. And then pull some edamame out of the freezer, microwave that or cook it on the stove top depending on your preferences. And bam, that's a meal. And so you could divide that alt also depending on different people's preferences. Also, my kids love spaghetti, and you can imagine that as a weight loss physician, I don't commonly recommend eating pasta frequently, but are there ways that you can do that that is in line with your goals? Is there a protein pasta, for example, that you can eat? Can you, instead of eating spaghetti on a bed of pasta, can you eat a similar dish on a bed as something else? Often when we make spaghetti, for example, my kids actually love spaghetti and I hate the texture of spaghetti. I think it tastes or it feels like worms in my mouth. And so I do not like eating it. I like other pastas, but I do not like spaghetti specifically, maybe angel hair. But my kids love spaghetti and I instead eat it on a bed of broccoli. And so we'll roast some broccoli that can be done in the oven in an air fryer. You can actually even skillet cook your broccoli or you can steam it if that is your preference. And then you've got maybe some ground up meat. You've got some sauce, you've got some pasta, you've got some Parmesan, you've got a roasted vegetable like broccoli, and people can build a different meal if they want more pasta. And then you could serve it with a side of pre-made salad or a bag of salad. Caesar salad is always our go-to, and so we'll get a bag of Caesar salad and serve that very frequently actually as an entree sometimes or as a side pretty frequently because it is a favorite for all of the people in our families. But if your kids hate salad, if people in your family hate Caesar, no big deal, substitute that out for something else that makes sense. You can also, speaking of broccoli, I don't remember the last time I bought a head of broccoli. I want you to go to your grocery store and look in the produce department. Usually on a refrigerated wall, there will be an entire section dedicated to precut, pre-washed vegetables that are just super, super easy. So all you have to do is open up the package and cook it. So that is a great option. Honestly, I don't want to wash my broccoli because then you have to let it dry because if you don't let it dry, and I love roasting my broccoli and it kind of steams and it gets kind of mushy. So honestly, for me, buying a bag of broccoli makes a lot of sense because I can literally just cut open that bag, pour it into, I'm in a really big skillet cooking my broccoli, but pour it into a olive oil grease skillet or avocado oil grease skillet and just cook that with a little bit of salt and pepper, and that's it takes five minutes or less because I'm not doing the cutting and washing and everything like that. So whatever your vegetable of choices or fruit of choice, take a peek at that precut pre-washed vegetable section. That is a absolute lifesaver that can make a huge difference. And for people who are busy, for people who are working professionals, it may be more expensive to get precut broccoli as opposed to a head of broccoli. But the bag of broccoli at Costco for example, is $4.99 for a three pound bag of broccoli, which we should have some video on this, that's a gigantic bag of broccoli. We can eat that broccoli for literally an entire week. It's a huge amount of broccoli for $4.99, and that may be more expensive than a couple of heads of broccoli. Honestly, it's probably not. If you're buying it at your regular grocery store, you might be talking about $3 for a small bag of broccoli versus a $1.50 or $2 for a head of broccoli depending on where you live. So typically it is more expensive to get a pre-cut version to get a pre-washed version, but I want you to think about the time that you're saving or does it also just make you more likely to do it if you're the person who gets berries, for example, and lets them just rot in the refrigerator because the effort of washing them was too challenging. I don't want you to beat yourself up about that. You are a human, you are a busy human, and if you want to buy pre-washed berries and just be able to, or even pre-cut berries so you can have a little strawberries and raspberries and blackberries and blueberries on your yogurt, for example, but you don't want to go through the effort of cutting those and washing those, that's okay. Just do what's going to be easiest for you. It might cost a dollar or two more per serving, but that may be worth your time or just worth the sanity of not having to do that extra preparation step. So I want you to give you permission to spend a couple of extra dollars if that is going to save you in other aspects. Now, thinking about other types of food, for example, one of my favorite recipes of all times is these chicken lettuce wraps. I don't think we've actually sent them out in our email list if we haven't, it's been a while. If we haven't, I will do that for you guys over the next couple of weeks here. But I have a favorite. It's a PF Chang's knockoff of chicken lettuce wraps, and it is my all time favorite meal. If this was my last meal, my last night on earth that I knew about, I would choose to eat these chicken lettuce wraps. And they are amazing because they're so flavorful and they're moderately easy to make. But the great news is you can make a huge, huge batch of this. So when I talk about doubling a recipe or tripling a recipe, for example, this is the type of thing that may take a little bit of prep work in advance, may take sort of start to finish 30 to 45 minutes of all in prep time. But this is something that if you made it on the weekend, for example, you might be able to divide it into batches and then eat it for lunches, eat it through. You could freeze portions and bring it out a couple of weeks later just so there's not monotony of eating the same meal all the time. But this is something that easily, easily can be doubled or even tripled in a recipe. And so kind of Asian lettuce wraps where you've got a flavorful chicken, you've got some water chestnuts, you've got some onions, you've got some crunch that comes in and then put into butter lettuce, the little butter lettuce makes really nice almost wraps or tacos almost. And so it can be served on other lettuces if you don't. My grocery store usually has butter lettuce, but every once in a while it'll be out of stock. And so you can also put it onto something like a Roma leaf, for example. So it doesn't necessarily have to be that butter lettuce, but it ends up being a really low carbohydrate option. There's not a huge amount of added sugar, just a little bit that comes in from some of the Asian sauces, but it's not like you're adding brown sugar or anything. And then it's wrapped into lettuce. And so you can serve this with a little bit of, I love the little fried crispy rice noodles. My kids and I buy those at the grocery store and they have so much fun even making these and sprinkling those on top. So that is super, super fun. We love eating that in our family and a huge recipe. It's already a big recipe, but if you have a larger family, you'll probably go through it or if you want to double or triple that portion, great way to space that workout or do that work once and then let it pay back and dividends in the future. Another great option. Sometimes you can have things that are totally pre-made. So sometimes on busy nights we will have those pre-cooked chicken sausages similar to bratwurst for example. They make ones that are, there's no added preservatives. They make ones that are pretty natural and pair that with cut up fruit or cut up vegetables sometimes. I was joking with one of my girlfriends the other night and I really love cooking, but right now I feel like I assembled dinner instead of actually cooked dinner. And that happens not infrequently in our life where I sort of assemble a dinner. And so that can look like, like I said, these precooked chicken sausages that are sort of bratwurst that you can warm up on the stove top. You could even warm up in the microwave. We do typically serve that with mustard and sauerkraut, but then we might literally have a sliced bell pepper, sliced cucumber or carrots, pieces of fruit. Maybe we'll have corn if that's in season and then pair it with hummus or ranch or something like that. And then it's really easy and my kids love it, so it's really simple for their childhood taste buds that aren't always the most adventurous, and it's also just really simple to pull together. We do a similar thing with buying a rotisserie chicken, for example, and cutting that up and serving it as a dinner option or buying. One of my favorite hacks recently is to buy cocktail shrimp. Again, a Costco. I told you guys I love Costco, but to buy a cocktail shrimp and then serve those onto a salad or even serve them on the site or on a bed of rice with other things. But that is a great fully cooked option that you can warm up if you want to. You can eat cold if you want to, but great option for just totally precooked and you can sort of assemble a dinner. Now, other options that I like to think of sometimes even charcuterie board. So a lot of people, we do this often when we have guest over, especially guests with children. It's just nice. We can put in some pretty simple cheeses. And so even for kids who are pretty picky to have a meal that is cheese and deli meat and crackers, we like to really make a pretty robust board too with olives and pickles and berries and apples and that type of thing. And I say board, but it doesn't have to be a fancy board either you're serving it for friends and it still doesn't have to be fancy. Or if you're making it for your own family, it certainly does not have to be fancy. Open the packages up, put a spoon in the olive jar, cut up an apple. It doesn't have to be like, I'm going to lay it out beautifully on this board. It can be sort of a charcuterie station where you set it up on your kitchen counter and walk down and grab the things you want to. It does not have to be a beautiful board, but kind of the idea of a charcuterie board can be a fun way to incorporate different fruits and vegetables compared to what you might normally have in a meal. And then with some cheese and meats there, of course, being careful that you're not getting terribly many saturated fats and doing that all the time. But super easy, super fun dinner, 10 out of 10 recommend that. We also, as I mentioned, I do bagged lettuce, especially bagged Caesar salad. Our family is super into that, but there are some bagged salads that are really, really, really good. And so if it's been a while since you've checked some out, trader Joe's make some really nice bagged salads. There's a brand called Taylor Farms that's available at most traditional grocery stores available at Costco that has some really nice salads that have some croutons, maybe some nuts, a good dressing, maybe cheese and seeds even, and those you can make a little bit more robust with adding your own seeds or your own nuts or adding for sure add a source of protein to that. But don't make it complicated. You can get a precooked chicken breast, you can get those shrimp like I talked about. You can get frozen fish is a really great option. There are some really great preseasoned produce, or excuse me, poultry or fish options that you can buy at most grocery stores. And so those are great options that you can either throw into the oven or maybe even you're buying a fully precooked version. So let's see. I've thought of a lot of different, I've probably come up with approaching 10 things right here, and these are the things that work really well for our family. You might listen to this and be like, I don't like any of that. Our family has totally different taste preferences, or I have a kid that's super picky. If that is the case, you're going to have to make some adaptations about what makes the most sense for your family. But what I would like to recommend is that you actually pause, take the time to reflect, take the time to see what are the foods that we're already making that we really like. Are there options for how we can prep those over the weekend? Are there options that we can make a double batch or a triple batch? Are there ways that, just recognizing maybe this stage of life, I'm not going to y'all, I don't remember the last time I cooked chicken just from either not in a crockpot or I buy a lot of precooked chicken. I love rotisserie chickens. I love buying the precooked chicken that you can buy in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. I buy a lot of precooked chicken, and I'll tell you, a lot of it is really, really good. Trader Joe's has some seasoned precooked chicken. That's amazing. I like to buy some of, there's a grilled chicken that you can buy at Costco that is precooked and made into single serving containers. We eat a lot of that in our household and that makes sense for our stage of life. And so are there things like that that you weren't even aware of that you could be doing? I bet so and so I do have a podcast episode called "Take a Field Trip to the Grocery Store." That is an excellent option. If you haven't listened to that episode, I do recommend taking a trip to your grocery store that before you even put anything into your cart to actually just take a trip around looking at that produce section, looking at what are the precut, the pre-washed options, and then moving over to the deli department. Are there precooked meats, for example, things that would just be really easy and really enjoyable for your family? I bet you that there is stuff there. So hopefully this has been some fun inspiration for you. If you have questions and you want suggestions, let me know. I would love to send those your direction. We love supporting our patients with doing this type of brainstorming work as well, so if someone is struggling with coming up with high protein snacks or breakfast, they can eat running out the door or easy dinner ideas. Doing this type of brainstorming is one of the things we do really frequently as part of our visits, and so I would love to support you in that way. If you live in the states of Illinois or Virginia where I'm licensed to practice medicine, I see patients throughout both of those states. I also see patients in person in my office in Charlottesville, Virginia, and so I would love to see you in person or by telemedicine. To learn more about us and to become a member in our practice, visit www.sarahstombaughmd.com. We'll have that link in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for joining us for today's episode. We'll see you all next week.