Sick of counting calories? This 5-minute morning routine helped me lose 25 menopausal pounds without tracking a single carb.

Ugh! How many calories is in an apple? A homemade cookie?

Are you sick of trying to use that app to track everything?

Years of diet trauma have created the perfect storm for rebelling against restricting our food in any way.

But wait! Mindful menu planning can be your super power. Allow me to demonstrate a simple five minute morning routine that can revolutionize how you handle food decisions for the rest of the day. It’s a key part of how I lost 25 menopausal pounds without counting a single carb.

My Planning Story

Let me paint the picture. Here’s the first time I really felt the power of planning ahead.

We were in Florida a few years ago and friends of ours were staying about 45 minutes away. She invited us for happy hour. Now here’s how things would normally go. I’d exercise iron willpower around the happy hour snacks. Getting hungrier and hungrier as dinner time approached. But in front of others, I managed to keep it together.

But as soon as I was out of sight, my “hangry” got ugly. I would grab food and grab it fast.

Can’t tell you the number of times my husband and I would be on a road trip and I’d say “I’m feeling a little peckish”. And he’d keep driving. So I’d say, “I’m getting hungry now”. And he’d keep driving. It didn’t take long for this to evolve into a full scale “you don’t love me” argument, ending up with me stress eating double the human quantity of take out.

This occasion was different though. I had started what eventually molded into the SHE Mindfulness program a couple months before. I was planning my food each day.

So on this occasion, I had anticipated that I would be driving the 45 minutes back home on an empty belly. I knew the temptation to start a fight and then snatch anything to soothe my hunger. I could do something different if I thought ahead.

All it took was a few minutes of consideration earlier in the day and some simple prep. So when we pulled into our trailer, hungry and tired, dinner was just a step or two to hot and ready.

How Can a Few Minutes in the Morning Fix OverEating?

This doesn’t sound like much. Why didn’t days always work out this way?

Because most days, before the SHE Mindfulness program, I didn’t take the time to prioritize my own needs. I figured out meals, snacks, rest breaks, hydration… all of it… on the fly. I had so many things on my mind. Such a big to do list. I left my own self care til I was too frazzled to make elegant decisions.

That all changed with the SHE Mindfulness program.

Now there are many facets to this change…. This prioritizing of self care… but today I want to focus on a key tool of the program… the Daily Planner Sheet.

(Please watch the video to get a full tutorial on how to use the sheet)

This is not a food tracker in the traditional sense. No calories counting. No macros. No foods are off limits. You can eat whatever, whenever, how much ever you want.

The KEY DIFFERENCE is that you are making these decisions early in the day when your brain is fresh. And you are looking at the big picture simultaneously. You are mindful of your goals and dreams AND the fact that you have a late meeting or there’s no good options for lunch at that building.

And that’s what you do in the morning. And it I know it sounds like a lot. It took me a long time to talk about all that. But, really, once you get practice at this, it can be done in under five minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Plan enough food. One thing that’s come up a lot for my clients is they don’t put enough food on the plan. They’re so used to diet programs, where you can only have 1200 calories a day, or you’re not allowed to have any… any of this kind of food or something. Throw all of that out. You don’t have to eat it if you’re not hungry, but make sure you put lots of food on your plan, because you’re literally wrestling with that diet mentality, that diet trauma.

And for me, if I didn’t see that there was plenty of options and plenty of food on my plan, I would get a sense of panic, because what if there’s not enough? I’ve never gone hungry a day in my life, but there was, for some reason, this scarcity mindset. I had to really work with that. So make sure you plan enough food.

2. Eating Off Plan: Sometimes you plan something in the morning, and then you realize you don’t have enough, because company’s dropping over, or you get to the meal, and you just can’t look at that leftover again. It’s okay. The planning part is the important part.

If you don’t follow the plan perfectly, we have a protocol for that in mindful eating. It all is part of the process. Not a slip up or failure.

3. Ditch the Deprivation: You never want to encourage a feeling of denial or deprivation. There’s no bonus points for being like super iron willpower. This is only going to trigger rebel eating.

   One thing you can do though, if you are tempted to go off plan and there’s no real good reason to go off plan, think of this as an invitation to spend a little time visiting with yourself. What are you feeling? Bored? Depressed? Exhausted? Frazzled? Thirsty?

And if a little self care doesn’t solve the issue, you can reassure yourself that you will plan for this food tomorrow or next week. Make the commitment to your plan reflective of your commitment to your own wellness. It doesn’t get compromised on a whim. You are a big boss!

You can always have the foods you love. But in the way your most rested and intelligent self has organized them.

That reassurance that you can always have what you really want might be enough to bring your brain into a calmer state of mind. Alleviate diet trauma.

4. Dealing with the Dread of Planning: Once you get practiced at this, you will have done it really quickly in the morning when your brain is fresh and you’ve made so many decisions already about your day.

This approach reduces decision fatigue. We make like 60,000 decisions every day. Do we turn left? Do we turn right? Do do we order this or not? Do we say hello to that person or not? Do we agree to go out for dinner or not? Do we wear red or we we wear blue? There are so many decisions through the day that our brain literally gets fatigued.

It makes perfect sense that we will offload so many of our outright decisions, into automatic pilot because we’re just simply tired. If you’ve made a lot of your food decisions earlier in the day, it’s one less task with which to struggle.

5. Relieve General Stress: The stress of being hangry leaves us so vulnerable to binging and stress eating. And I really want us to be able to prioritize our own health care, our own well-being, which means don’t let yourself get so tired and stressed.

Go get out ahead of it. And that’s what the planning is all about.

Get a Free Mindful Eating Guide

This isn’t about just losing pounds for a wedding or a vacation. It’s about prioritizing your needs for once, putting yourself first.

Your outward appearance begins to align with the love you lavish on yourself, and it happens almost effortlessly.

There’s no dieting, no deprivation, no denial, and no drama.