• Meal Plan 6

Meal Plan

• Who should get the meal plan?

  • Vegans and vegetarians who want to make sure they’re getting balanced nutrition
  • Meat eaters who want to try plant-based meals or plan for a vegan or vegetarian spouse, friend or loved one
  • Health-oriented people who want to make nutrient-dense meals with whole foods
  • Busy people who don’t have time to plan out all their meals for the week, or follow elaborate recipes every night
  • People who want to learn how to make healthy meals for themselves, rather than eating out or eating junk food all the time
  • People who have lost touch with the portion sizes they need to nourish themselves without getting excessive calories

  Is that everyone? Not quite… but it could be anyone. Even the USDA knows it’s possible: “Vegetarian diets can meet all the recommendations for nutrients.“

• Am I actually going to follow this plan?

  Well, you may not follow the plan exactly as laid out, but hopefully it’s still a good resource to give you lots of new healthy recipes and also show you how to portion meals to get the right amount of nourishment and energy for you.

  It can also be used as a guide to show how to get balanced nutrition on a vegan diet. I put this together to show you how healthy eating works, so you can understand it and make sure that you’re getting the right nutrition and make meals for yourself every day.

  My goal is to empower you to have the knowledge to understand how to eat healthfully on a daily basis, whether you follow an exact plan or not.

• What happens if I don’t like one of the meals?

  If there’s one recipe or meal that you look at and know that you’re not going to want to eat, feel free to change whatever you don’t like about it.

  I often give substitution suggestions, but if you really don’t like anything about a meal you can swap in another meal from the plan, anything from the bank of hundreds of healthy recipes, or any other healthy recipe you enjoy – you can input your own into the program. Then just print off an updated grocery list and calendar, and any other recipes.

• I don’t have a lot of time to cook. Are the meals quick to prepare?

  I designed the plan to have simple, quick meals on weeknights and any longer meals, or ones to be made in larger batches, are on weekends. I generally try to keep weeknight meals to 30 minutes cooking time, and weekends might be 45 minutes or an hour. I also try to keep meals to one or two pots so that dish cleaning time is minimized as well.

  If you have days when you just have absolutely no time to make a meal, I have a section in the site where I divulged my secret shortcuts and options for making packaged foods healthier, as well as tips for eating out and at parties.

• What happens if there’s a day where I can’t cook, or I’m going out with friends?

  That’s no problem – just swap meals around in your planner and update your grocery list. Take the concepts of healthy eating I give you in the plan to try to make fairly healthy choices, and then pick back up the next day or the next meal. If you didn’t know in advance, and have already gone grocery shopping for the week, you can make the meal you missed as an extra meal another time.

• Do I have to follow the plan exactly as laid out?

  No, definitely not! I set up the plan to be as detailed and complete as possible for the people who want that kind of support and structure. My best friend loves it because she’s a super-planner and my meal plans take the load off her cause she knows exactly what and how much and when to eat.

  But you could easily just look at the recipes and meals and do your own thing – either following them as laid out but in a different order, or just take them as ideas and make them in your own way. You could follow a day of the plan, and then do your own thing for a day, then come back to another day of the plan. However you want to do it.

  You can add things, you can take things out if you don’t like them, you can swap foods around. You can swap meals around to different days, you can swap other meals into the plan from the bank of hundreds of other recipes to find one that suits your taste, you can even input your own recipes! Once you’re done, you just have to print off the new grocery list, calendar and recipes.

  The plan may seem very precise and exact, but that’s only because I made it for the people (like my best friend) who want that degree of precision. For the people (like me) who prefer general guidelines and concepts to exactness, just think of the plan as an idea from which you can jump off in your own way.