Keeping Your Diet Simple

I am a minimalist at heart and that touches every part of my life. Recently, I have been looking at my foods, my meals, and my groceries in a different light and trying to determine how to make this whole area more simple than it has ever been.

I have put in place several ideas to make foods more simple:
1. Meal planning
2. Eating more whole foods
3. Only cooking recipes with few ingredients
4. Shopping from a specific list (broken down by my specific grocery aisles!)

Other ideas I have tried:
1. Diets such as Whole30, Beachbody, Paleo, NSNG, etc.
2. Eliminating processed foods
3. Eliminating dairy

We all want to eat healthy, easy, fast, and probably cheap. The problem with this is the easy, fast, cheap foods are not always healthy. And the healthy foods are not usually easy or fast or cheap.

Finally, I have stumbled upon an idea that I feel may work for me. It is disguised as "meal prepping" but I think it is easier than that and "more". I tried it for the first time this week and it was amazing! It provided the following benefits for me:

a) I always ate healthy for breakfasts and lunches (these are the meals I used this idea for)
b) once "prepped", the meals were quickly ready to eat
c) I always felt prepared this week when thinking of what I would eat!

Minimalist Diet

Meal prep on Sunday or Monday for the whole week.
I meal prepped Breakfast and Lunch for each day.
Eat the SAME meal for breakfast. And the SAME meal for lunch.
Next week, REPEAT.

So what did I eat for breakfast this week? What did I eat for lunch? Was I completely bored?

My breakfast was 2 hardboiled eggs (prepped a dozen), nuts (raw cashews, almonds, or pistachios) - 2 handfuls, and a side of fruit (watermelon, berries, or apple).

My lunch was shredded chicken (3/4 cup), salad greens, raw spinach leaves, chopped tomato, sliced cucumber, blueberries, and Green Goddess dressing. The chicken was shredded from a precooked rotisserie chicken from the grocer (so easy and affordable!) and provided 5 servings - plenty for all lunches. The salad was prepped in individual containers. Dressing added during actual consumption. I love Tessemae dressings. No sugar and made out of whole ingredients.

Soooo...was I bored? NOPE. In fact, I felt less stress and happy knowing my meals were ready to go whenever I got hungry and there was no worry over what to eat and how long it would take to prepare it.

Another benefit was the portability of the lunches! One day the kids and I had lunch at the pool and I just grabbed my salad and poured dressing into a small TBS container and DONE. Took a fork and my water bottle and ate my salad poolside. It was great!

I will be continuing this minimalist diet, varying the meals for different weeks, but always prepping the same 5 breakfasts and the same 5 lunches during a week. Healthy eating has never been so simple!