The keto diet can become an overwhelming and unsustainable diet when you’re trying to do everything perfectly. You want to eat healthy, lose weight and feel your best all at once. This means eating the correct foods, tracking portion sizes and reigning in your self control.
If you’ve been tirelessly spending hours of additional effort each week struggling yet determined to stick to your keto diet then look no further. No one has that much time to waste on figuring out what food they will be eating. I am going to give you my top three tips to simplify your keto diet in order to free up those hours for the more important things in life.
- Stop trying to meal prep every single meal
- Prepare to be on-the-go
- Keep your kitchen stocked with fallbacks
Meal Prepping
Meal prepping for your week has become a popular trend. The idea of meal prepping is to pick a day, prep all your meals ahead of time and then have pre-made meals ready to go for your entire week allowing more time to spend with your family on busy weeknights. After spending hours coming up with meal ideas, making shopping lists, going to the grocery store, and then spending my entire Sunday afternoon cooking up a storm I started to rethink this meal prepping situation. Instead of spending the twenty minutes each night cooking dinner I was instead spending nearly an entire day of my weekend meal prepping. On top of that I still found myself spending at least 15 minutes having to reheat dinners or put finishing touches on a dish. Why was I spending half a day making food rather than using that time to do something fun with my kids or getting some much deserved relaxation time before starting another busy week?
The solution turned out to be easier than any YouTube meal prep video I’ve watched. Eliminate the meal prep in exchange for preparing a standard go-to weeknight dinner. I’ve traded in my hours of finding new dishes and creating meal plans for a quick half hour trip to the grocery store to gather enough meat, vegetables and healthy fats for the week. This means I can purchase what’s on sale, saving myself not only time, but money. I found when I was meal prepping I was spending additional money trying to purchase items I wouldn’t otherwise buy to obtain all the ingredients in some type of casserole recipe I had found online. With my new approach I have scrapped the recipes and moved on to just purchasing the items I know I should be eating.
During the week I pull some meat out of my freezer in the morning and either throw it in my slow cooker or put it in the sink to defrost. Then after work I cook up some vegetables in some healthy fat and grill up my meat, if it’s not already cooked. To save yourself time for another day just take out double the meat and cook up twice the amount of vegetables. If I have a really busy night, or just don’t feel like cooking later, I’ll throw some vegetables, meat and bone broth in my slow cooker either before I go to bed the night before or in the morning and when I get home there’s a pot of delicious soup waiting to be eaten. This new routine has saved me so much time and money. I don’t think I could ever go back to meal prepping.
Prepare to be On-the-Go
In a perfect world we would cook all our food at home and sit around the table with our families three times a day with our healthy meals. This is not a reality for most families. Before starting keto our family would often find ourselves rushing through the drive thru on a busy weeknight or eating sandwiches in the car on the way to sports practices. There are not a lot of keto friendly drive thrus in my area and bread’s off the table so I need to be prepared for busy on-the-go times. I do this by keeping a to-go backup plan ready for unexpected travels. Each week I ensure that I have three very important items stocked up:
- A bottle of sweetener in my purse
- A grab and go snack on hand wherever I am
- A grab and go snack in my fridge.
The sweetener is usually for coffee. I try to eat a naturally sourced sweetener, so if I’m out and about and just need a quick burst of energy, I’ll grab a coffee with extra cream and put a few squirts of my own sweetener in it. I usually keep this in my purse, diaper bag or car along with my grab and go snack.
My grab and go snack is something that doesn’t need to be refrigerated. This way I can store it in my bag for the week without it going bad. Usually this snack is a keto friendly bar or a bag of pork rinds. Whatever you decide to use ensure that you know what the macros are when you pack it (write it on the bag if you need to) and try to keep it as low carb as possible so you don’t have to worry about your carb count.
The final item to keep on hand is something quick to grab in your fridge. At our house we always keep a bag of no carb pepperoni sticks in stock. You can keep any low/zero carb snack you like to just grab and go. Some alternative ideas are cheesesticks, pickles, olives, baby cucumbers or deli meat. Anything that you can just throw into a sandwich bag while running out the door that will deter you from rolling through the drive thru.
Keep your Kitchen Stocked with Fallbacks
We have three fallback meals on hand at any given time. These are meals that everyone in the house enjoys, they’re easy to make and quick to prepare. Every family’s fallbacks are going to be different. My three fallbacks are egg roll in a bowl, frozen leftover meat with frozen vegetables and bacon with eggs. Yours could be anything you want. This works best if you stick with things that are going to last a long time if you don’t eat them this week. Make sure they take less than 15 minutes to prepare. If you have older children try to make at least one of these meals something that they can help with or prepare on their own.
We try to keep a standard meal recipe at our house. Each meal consists of four main ingredients: meat, vegetable, fat and spices. Each of these four components changes with every meal. However, I find that because I try to stick to purchasing meat on sale, and usually do the same with vegetables, there are only so many combinations to be made. You can change up these meal variations by including different fats and spices to your meat and vegetables. This keeps things simple to prepare, but still gives you enough variety so you won’t get bored.
If you are practicing intermittent fasting you may choose not to eat breakfast at all. Cutting out an entire meal makes any lifestyle easier. I try to skip my breakfast whenever I can, but sometimes I wake up feeling famished and know that I’ll never make it to lunch time without some food. I always keep a to-go breakfast that I enjoy on hand for these mornings. For me this means keeping a can of coconut cream in my cupboard. I put a few tablespoons of coconut cream and a dash of vanilla extract in a travel mug and top it up with hot coffee. I enjoy this so much that I never feel guilty about eating this for breakfast. Sticking to your keto diet is much easier when you’re enjoying the food you eat.
No one can perfectly execute their keto plans 100% of the time. As long as you’re trying your best that’s a success in itself. As with anything in life practice and repetition makes it easier. So scrap those time consuming meal preps, keep some healthy low-carb snacks handy and your kitchen stocked and you should have no problem saving time, money and your sanity.
