What is the number one thing you don’t want to leave the house without?  I’ll give you a clue… it’s not an umbrella.  The number one thing you need to consider imposes a MUCH greater long-term effect to your weight, how you feel, your health, and your life.  So, what should you NEVER leave the house without?  A game plan for what you are going to eat.  Stay with me! 

As I observed my diet over the years, and constantly analyzed the reasons for my successes or failures, I learned one simple truth.  Leaving the house, not knowing where my next meal would come from, or even when I would eat it, was an “easy, no-bake” recipe for eating in a way that did not align with my goals.

Where Not Having a Game Plan Left Me

If I headed to work without a lunch, I not only obsessed about food from the time I left the house to the time I ate lunch, but when the time came, I often made the worst decisions about what to eat.  I was more vulnerable to smells (of sugar, carbs, and bad-for-you fats dancing through the air), close and convenient “goodies” at work (you know the kind), and to the unhealthy foods I heard my coworkers talking about.

Leaving the house without a game plan for when I would eat, also left me susceptible to making decisions under the influence of hunger.  For example, I might go out and run errands and realize one hour into running errands that I was hungry.  I might try to power through, but inevitably, I would become ravenous.  On my way home, two hours later, I might call my husband and say, “Let’s order pizza and pick up some dessert to eat,” while the healthy leftovers I originally planned to eat would sit in the fridge.

In addition to eating unhealthy foods that didn’t align with my goals for staying lean and healthy, I realized two consequences that I bet you can relate to.

(1) Lack of planning created anxiety in my life, and (2) my unplanned meals made me feel hungry a few hours later.

Anxiety and Cortisol

Making decisions multiple times a day about what I was going to eat caused me anxiety.  When I took the time to plan and establish routines and habits for what I would eat each day, I made less decisions, experienced less anxiety, and felt freer. 

Did you know that feelings of stress and anxiety trigger a hormone called cortisol?  Let me tell you a story about cortisol and cause and effect:

Once upon a time, a stress hormone called cortisol, A.K.A. “the playground bully,” decided to pick on a hormone called leptin.  Leptin was responsible for telling humans when they were full, so that they wouldn’t over eat. 

Cortisol bullied leptin so much that leptin got scared and ran away.  When ghrelin, another hormone, at school, saw that cortisol had scared leptin away, ghrelin decided to join cortisol and take the place of leptin on the playground.  Guess what ghrelin’s role was?  Ghrelin was an expert at making humans feel hungry.

Cortisol and ghrelin worked together to make humans feel hungry and eat sugar, empty carbs, unhealthy fats, caffeine, alcohol, and more.  The bully and his followers knew that making humans eat these foods would make cortisol stronger, and they created a self-perpetuating cycle so that they could always stay in control.

Did you follow that?  Cortisol makes you eat when you are not hungry.  Also, cortisol makes you eat food that produces MORE cortisol, making it REALLY hard to break the cycle of cortisol.  For a more scientific explanation read here.

Don’t worry though.  YOU can break the cycle of cortisol by creating an eating game plan each day. 

I will give you guidance on making a game plan, but first let me tell you why my unplanned meals left me feeling hungry.

Still Feeling Hungry

As I mentioned, cortisol triggers you to keep eating and feeling hungry.  But here is another, closely related reason why I still felt hungry after eating on the days that I left the house without an eating, game plan.

Despite my efforts to make healthy decisions, buying meals from the restaurants or convenience stores around me, when I didn’t have a game plan, could never hold a candle to the balanced, clean, nourishing, and satisfying meals I planned and prepared at home.

A classic sandwich and chips from a sandwich shop nearby never satisfied me the way an organic kale salad topped with salmon, avocado, walnuts, and apples and a large grapefruit from home could.  While the sandwich and chips made me feel full and sluggish, the salad and fruit from home made me feel full and energized.  After eating a sandwich and chips I bought from nearby, I experienced hunger again in two hours, but the kale salad and fruit kept me full for several hours.

I realized that when I planned, I planned balanced meals with lean proteins, healthy fats, fiber, water, and vitamins and minerals that left me feeling satisfied for hours.  Restaurants and convenience stores nearby could rarely offer me that kind of balance.  For some balanced meal suggestions read here.

How to Establish Your Game Plan

So you may have just understood that you need to make everything from scratch and never eat out, but that is not the case!  Regardless of whether you are staying home all day or planning on a day out, you need to plan what you are going to eat, and it doesn’t all have to be scratch-made salads from home.

1) Map out your day

In order to create a game plan, you need to know the sequence of your day.  Are you working during the day, then heading to a holiday party in the evening?  Are you staying home all day?  Do you plan to work out?  How long will your errands take?  Once you have established the lay of the land, you can make some game-plan decisions.

Tip: Don’t feel like you need to make a new game plan EVERY day.  I build habits and routines into every week that eliminate daily decisions.  For example, I always eat breakfast at home, I typically eat leftovers for lunch, I eat a home-cooked dinner five or six times a week, and I may eat out once or twice a week.  I try to look at the upcoming week every Sunday and start planning for any weekly nuances.  For example, I may look at the upcoming week and realize that, on Monday, I am meeting a friend for breakfast, and on Thursday night, I have a date with my husband.  I then establish a game plan for how to eat on each of those occasions.

2) Stick to your game plan

The point of having a game plan is to eliminate anxiety and decisions that suck up your time and energy and make you eat foods that you later regret.  Once you make a game plan, stick to it and enjoy the freedom that comes with sticking to a plan. 

Tip: Don’t think that sticking to a game plan means that you can never indulge in something that is not a perfectly-balanced meal.  Little cheats need to be part of your game plan.  For example, if I know I will be attending a holiday party, and I know that the meals I planned to cook will only last me six days of the seven-day week, I may plan to eat more flexibly at the holiday party and plan to order takeout for my family at the end of the week.  If I did not plan the cheat, I DO NOT indulge in the cheat.

3) Meal prep

Many people believe that they do not have time to meal prep, but meal prepping is one of the most efficient ways to spend your time.  Rather than expending energy all week long in smaller increments to decide what to cook for dinner, pick up takeout, or aimlessly wander the aisles of the grocery store, you can plan meals and a grocery list, shop once, and cook, prep, and clean everything once a week.  While meal prepping will take a few hours, don’t fall into the trap of believing that you are not wasting MORE time by making decisions about what you eat daily.

4) Pack emergency snacks

Sometimes the best plans do not work out the way you hoped they would.  Your “quick” trip to the store may turn into a five-hour shopping marathon, and your routine doctor’s appointment may result in a long wait.  Always keep healthy snacks on hand!  I keep clean energy bars, nitrate-free jerkies, nuts, and whole fruits, like apples and oranges, in my bag or car for snacking when times get desperate.

5) Have a back-up plan

Life can get busy and we all need options that we can fall back on when we are not able to put the time into our game plan that we need.  For example, when I was working in an office, and I was too busy to put much thought into weekly lunches, I would fall back on a quick and deliberate ten- minute grocery store trip.  I could whiz through the store and fill my cart with shelf-stable soups, rice crackers, a jar of almond butter, cans of tuna, bananas, and other better-for-you lunch items that I could keep at work and quickly assemble for lunch each day.

Whether it is a restaurant that you can order healthy takeout from, or the prepared-foods section of a natural grocery store, identify solid options that you can always fall back on to quickly stock up on healthy ingredients or meals until you have time to give your game plan more thought.