COLOR Me Bad
What a one hit wonder they were! And when it comes to menu planning for an effective diet, you do not want to be a one hit wonder! But you do want to C.O.L.O.R. yourself bad!
Menu planning may seem incredibly daunting task at first if you think you are just going to write one up without a “plan”. You know how much simpler life seems when you have a step by step guide that shows you how to do something. So let’s quickly break down the process of making a menu:
| C | Color code it | How many colors do you have in the week? Can you add more? |
| O | Order it | Your goal decides your menu format. There are a few and we’ll cover as many as we can. |
| L | Liven it up | Too much seriousness in your menu means you are going to stray. Let’s dress this puppy up! |
| O | Optimize it | Step back and look at all you have. Can we improve anything any where? We’ll go over what to look for. |
| R | Repeat it all over again | Create your own “bank” of menus. |
If your menu has COLOR, it has everything! When I receive food diaries to check out (and in season I probably view over 50/week), I see many of the same eating patterns that we as busy people like to perpetuate:
- Eating the same thing everyday
- Limited choices of fruits and veggies
- Focusing on only the “super” foods (how much broccoli can you eat?)
- No “fun” in the diet
- No rhyme or reason for food placement
If you do not know why you do something or are not sure how to do something, you will never really do it well. You are just going through the motions faking it while you hope you are making it. But you know you really aren’t making it and you are not quite sure why. You never seem to truly get that body that you want because you fall short somehow every time.
There are hundreds of books out there with recipes in them and now there are even people selling ebooks of menu plans. You are more than welcome to find one of those and follow them if you want. But what’s going to happen? You are going to become bored with the food choices or feel limited by the way they put the menus together. What happens if all of the recipes are not clean enough for your goal? What if they give you plans and their lowest cal level is 1400 and you are 4’10” and 95lbs? That’s like Thanksgiving for you! And because you do not know why they did what they did, you cannot adapt it to be what you like it to be. How about just creating your own menus, with your own fun added to them?
Let’s begin the process of creating our own menus and take it step by step—from color coding it all the way to repetition—because face it, no one really knows what you like but you. And success depends upon you planning an effective menu and adhering to it as much as possible.
