Considering that the overall goal for this month is getting on a regular schedule, I have to take my eating habits into consideration too. One of the things that contributes, for better and worse, to what and when I eat is the amount of meal planning and preparation that I do. This is something I’ve been doing for a very long time, even before I was diagnosed, but the reason for doing it have gone beyond a less stressful day to eating healthy and well balanced – it’s become more important to my well-being over time.
A little background on Cushing’s Syndrome, it causes your body to create excess cortisol, which naturally causes the body to store more fat, typically around your midsection. Most people with Cushing’s have not only an increase in belly fat but also in odder areas; upper back and face are the most common. As a result of the excess fat storage you also gain quite a bit of weight, in the four months before diagnosis I gained forty pounds. One of the first things you should do is get together with a nutritionist and come up with strategies to at the very least slowdown that steady gain. My target was to not gain more than 10 pounds in that first year and I’m happy to say that I maintained that rate for the last three years up until I fell off the wagon last month and popped up a full twenty pounds in just 5 weeks.
Not an awesome disease but manageable if you have discipline.
For the duration, I’ve had some pretty simple dietary requirements; I’m a vegetarian so my protein can’t come from meat, my calorie limit is 2000 per day, I eat a limited amount of processed foods, sugar and dairy, and only get one cheat meal a week. With those guidelines, it is easy to come up with meal plans that are healthy and adhere to my no prep stress desires.
Every Saturday, I sit down to plan out the week – three meals and three snacks per day – pull together a grocery list and update my tracking software with any new recipes or ingredients. I tend to keep things simple and eat the same meals/snacks over the week, especially my breakfast. As you can see from the image below it’s very straight forward.
On Sundays I actually do the meal preparations, this entails taking of all the ingredients that I need for breakfast, lunch and snacks and doing whatever preparation needs to happen and then packaging them all up. This usually takes an hour or two depending on the cooking involved. My dinners have come from Blue Apron for the last year so I’ve effectively outsourced much of the prep work there.
Aside from the health aspects, the biggest benefit that I gain by doing things this way is that when I get up in the morning, my food for the day is already ready to go. I bag it all, mix my smoothie and grab my coffee and I’m out the door in less than 10 minutes. It does also prevent me from making bad choices for lunch or worse skipping lunch all together, and keeps my blood sugar and energy at a consistent level all day long. I think, for me, it is well worth the sacrifice of couple of hours of time in order to make this happen.
For me the biggest barrier was making the commitment to get it going. Making sure I have all the ingredients and containers to pull it off came through a lot of trial and error but once you get through a couple of weeks you’re pretty much set. I do mix things up over the year as the seasons change, more soups in the winter and more salads in the summer. If you don’t I think it’s pretty easy to get bored. And occasionally your taste buds will need a little reboot.
If you want to give it a shot, I recommend any containers made by Sistema. They are durable, convenient and often come with utensils.
Vibrant Thing 