Get fit: Meal planning, workouts, spreadsheets, and more!

The final results!

dun dun dun, drumroll please…

It went… okay! More green than anything else, I’m pretty happy overall.

We didn’t manage to get much gym time in, I’ve just been dealing with too much at work lately and haven’t had the energy for it.

But the meal prep has been awesome and has been a big stress-reliever overall, taking a lot of the weight off my mind of what I’m going to eat every day. And I have been eating way less junk food at work since I have my nutritious lunchboxes to keep the hunger away.

We’re definitely going to continue doing meal prep, it’s a great habit that I’m happy we started.

The weight-loss results were so-so:

I’m only down 2 pounds, which isn’t great but it’s something. My husband managed to lose almost twice as much and I’m proud of him! Every little bit of progress counts, and I’m just happy that we’re both feeling healthier.

And the cats love “helping” us cook, aka Noodle tries to eat everything. Here is a bonus pic of him eating a chickpea (one of his favorites):

Anyway, here’s the spreadsheet link with the full progress report https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRH1YNt1Y_3xn91e4ZCD_y_J9pSc42ufAjMKLlUY16xetDFX0MNCPUXgVVKIqdGSSAEEfc4eLEGdXAO/pubhtml . I’d call this one pretty successful overall!

I’m a bit behind on updates! I changed a few of my goals after realizing that maybe I bit off a bit more than I could handle. I decided to drop the workouts from my goals, I’m just in a bit of a stressful period with work and it’s taking all my energy and motivation just to keep up with the diet - working out just ain’t in the cards right now.

We also decided to make a minor change to cheat day: alcohol is now allowed on cheat days! This is mostly just because my husband and I go on a weekly date to try out a new restaurant and we also love having a fancy cocktail or beer tasting along with it. It was just taking away some of the fun, so we decided to just allow it. It’s not that big a deal since we weren’t trying to quit drinking altogether, mainly just wanted to drink less for health/calorie reasons.

Anyway, the diet has still been going great and we definitely want to keep doing this even after the 30 day project is over. Here’s some pictures of the latest batch of meal prep!

Lots of lunchboxes and a bunch of pots going on the stove:

Tonight’s dinner served up with 4 more portions packed up for later. Saffron rice and tomato & corn creamy soup.

As always, Noodle helped.

So, I’m starting to realize that thursdays might not be the best day for me as far as working out goes…

I think the problem is that thursday is the day when I’m most weighed down from the workweek. So it’s really hard to get the energy and motivation to get myself to the gym when all I wanna do is curl up on the couch and zone out. I’m thinking about moving the workouts from Tues/Thurs/Sun to Mon/Wed/Sat (or Mon/Wed/Fri depending on if I feel up for it on friday). Or maybe 2x a week workout is enough for me - I have been steadily losing weight just from what I’ve done so far.

First week has gone really well! All the food has been tasty and I’ve felt satisfied and not hungry. Still have cravings to snack a lot but that’s more of a mental hurdle I have to get over. Also we missed a workout this week because I wasn’t feeling well, but otherwise everything has been on track.

Just finished meal prepping for the coming week, this one was a bit less effort than last week since there wasn’t a lot of cooking involved. Most of these dishes are better when freshly made so I just chopped and portioned all the ingredients instead of pre-cooking them.

Feels good to be basically done for the week. Everything just needs to be tossed in a pan and cooked and we’ve got dinner ready :D

Starting the first day of meal prep today. Made lunches for the next 2 days (since these include a lot of fresh raw veg I don’t like to prep further than that) and dinners for the next 4.

Before and after pics!

The grocery haul (and Noodle helping me out):

Everything almost done:

I’m going to be starting my project a few days early just because of the nature of meal planning - it’s a lot easier to line it up with the start of the week.

I spent all day today getting the meal plan together and the spreadsheet has come along really nicely if I do say so myself. Super excited to get into cooking and eating good healthy food.

Read-only link to the full spreadsheet that I will be filling out

If you want to play with it yourself, I also made a shareable empty copy that anyone can download here. (but be warned, if you mess with it too much things might break - some of the formulas are kinda hacky and hardcoded 😅 it should work for the most part though)

Some screenshots!