The Good Medicine Guide to Meal Prep

I’m going to be real with you - if you want to eat better, having a plan is absolutely key. Meal prep is a big part of that plan. Investing a little bit of time in planning and preparing your meals ahead of time is absolutely, one hundred percent worth it.

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to cook for hours to prep your meals. There are different levels of meal prep, and I’m going to cover them in this post. We’re all different - some of us enjoy cooking, some of us really hate it and would rather do anything but cook. It’s okay - there’s strategies for all of us!

For those who like to cook…

For those of us who like to cook, there’s two main ways to meal prep. You’re either going to be preparing the whole meal at once OR you’re going to do the component method. Both are totally valid and awesome. If you don’t mind eating basically the same thing a few days in a row, the Full-On-Meal Method is probably best for you. If you like to have more flexibility with your meals, I would recommend the Component Method. I’m personally a big fan of the Component Method, and that’s how I most often meal prep.

The Full-On Meal Prep Method

All I mean by this is that you’re preparing multiple servings of the same meal. This might look like several portions of a composed meal (ie - a veggie burger with sweet potato fries and salad) or a casserole or soup. I personally find casseroles to be one of the easiest ways to achieve the Full-On Method. This is best if you’re looking for minimal dish-dirtying and clean up and if you don’t want to have to think about your meals later on - they’ll just be ready to grab, heat and eat!

My Sage + Thyme Spaghetti Squash Bake is a great, easy example of the Full-On Method.

The Component Meal Prep Method

This is my personal favorite way to meal prep. You basically prep all the components of a meal and then when it comes time to eat, you throw them all together. I like this method because it allows for flexibility. So you can make it the same way every time or leave some ingredients out or add some new ones you get from the store mid-week. It keeps it a little more fresh and exciting. I’m also a big fan of “bowls” - aka, just throwing a bunch of stuff in a bowl and calling it a meal! It’s how I eat most often and it works for me.

You’ll want to consider the following components - a protein - cooked and ready to go, 2-3 vegetables - cooked/prepped and ready to go, greens - washed, chopped and ready, grain or bean (optional), a healthy fat - avocado or nuts/seeds, and a dressing/sauce (the dressing could also be your healthy fat). So let’s look at some examples:

• black beans + roasted sweet potatoes + salsa + avocado dressing + fresh cilantro

• baked chicken + roasted broccoli + carrots cut into matchsticks + bok choy + almond butter ginger sauce

• cooked ground beef + sautéed onions and peppers + chopped, washed romaine + creamy cashew ranch dressing

• chicken sausage + cucumbers + tomatoes + olives + mixed greens + hummus

Another way I like to use the Component Method is by creating a simple soup or salad base that I can then change up each time I eat. For example, I love making a totally veggie chili (no meat or beans) and then throughout the week I can eat it as is if I want a light meal, add some avocado on top, top with a sausage or a fried egg, or serve with tortillas or chips. Same thing with a salad - I can make a kale salad with a tahini dressing and then roast some vegetables and a rotisserie chicken and then change up what I top the salad with all week.

For those who would rather not cook…

Don’t worry - you’re not doomed. With food brands becoming more and more conscious of health and ingredients, there’s plenty of good options. Grocery stores also provide pre-chopped vegetables which can be really helpful since chopping vegetables is often the most time consuming part of meal prep. Places like Whole Foods have hot bars where you can buy pre-cooked veggies. I would say reserve this for special circumstances because 1. it’s expensive and 2. as of now, Whole Foods still uses mostly canola oil to roast the vegetables for their hot bar, which is an inflammatory oil :( I do, however, fully endorse Whole Foods organic rotisserie chickens - which don’t use any oil.

Let’s look at some examples of some seriously minimal meal prep:

• Siete Foods tortillas + Whole Foods organic rotisserie chicken and/or Better Bean Black Beans + mixed greens + organic salsa + guacamole (salsa and guacamole can be bought pre-made!)

• Pre-zoodled zucchini noodles + organic marinara sauce + grass-fed ground beef or organic tempeh (all you have to do is brown the meat or tempeh in a pan, add sauce and zoodles!)

• Organic chicken sausage + pre-chopped veggies + Primal Kitchen dressing (add sausage and veggies to a pan, sauté until brown and cooked, top with dressing)

• Hope Hummus + pre-cut crudite + pita or tortilla chips (the ultimate lazy person’s dinner)

• Amy’s Organic Soup + chopped avocado (so easy!)

Hopefully that gives you an idea of the types of foods to have on hand and how to easily prepare it! It’s more like “assembling” a meal from other healthy ingredients, and there’s no shame in that!

Other tips

Here are some other meal prep tips to help keep you on top of your food game:

• Whenever you cook, make more than you need. I see no sense in cooking only two portions when it hardly takes any extra effort to cook four.

• Freeze it! Make a huge batch of soup and freeze some extras for those busy weeks. You can also freeze casseroles pretty easily.

• I love roasting a bunch of sweet potatoes to have on hand. You can bake them whole, in half or my personal favorite - in large coins. They’re super versatile - you can top with avocado or hummus for a savory snack or almond butter and banana for a sweet version. They also provide complex carbs and valuable nutrients. They can be the base of your meal or just bulk it up. Basically - just have some sweet potatoes around.

• Chop vegetables ahead of time - even spending just 20 minutes or so chopping up onions, carrots, whatever else you have on hand - can make it so much easier to throw together a quick meal on even the busiest of nights. If you can’t stand chopping, look for the pre-cut stuff at Whole Foods or Trader Joes.

• Know what you have - one of the biggest issues I see is that people forget about the food they prep! I highly suggest storing your prep in clear containers, with labels if that helps, in plain view in your fridge. If your fridge makes that hard to do, then keep a list on the outside of the fridge with a list of what you prepped that week.

• No shame in frozen veggies - they’re awesome to have on hand for emergencies!

• Make a glorified snack plate - honestly, one of my favorite ways to eat! Just make a big plate with your favorite snacks - maybe some deli meat, crackers, cut up veggies, dip, dried fruit and nuts. Any snack can be a meal if you eat enough of it :)

• Canned fish - another one of my favorite staples. Mix a can of wild-caught salmon with some avocado and dijon mustard and it’s basically a meal! It also bulks up any salad.

What’s your favorite way to meal prep? Do you have a go-to recipe? Let me know below!

Weight Loss: Two Major Overlooked Components (Part II) - Trauma + Unprocessed Emotions

In case you missed last week’s post on toxicity and how it impacts weight loss, check that out here.

Today we’re going to dive into another component of weight loss that most people don’t take into account. It’s not talked about much, it seems a little esoteric, and there’s not much research on the subject (but it has started!). I think it’s going to be one of the most important things that we need to address as a culture, and I believe you’ll be hearing more and more about it in the upcoming years.

I’m talking about trauma, repressed and unprocessed emotions and their connection with health and weight. To some, this may seem obvious. To others, this may seem outlandish. Even as recently as the 1990s, if you were a scientist suggesting that there was a connection between emotions and physical health - you would have been laughed out of the room.

But we’re starting to understand this process more. The mind-body connection is a foundational part of ancient medicine systems like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, but somehow in our modern Western culture, we’ve lost it. The brain is the brain and the body is the body and your feelings have nothing to do with either. We’re seeing this idea of mind-body connection starting to come back, though. And thank goodness because I truly believe it is one of the most overlooked and most important keys to achieving health.

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Modern Science and Ancient Wisdom

In 1985 Dr. Vincent Felitti, a physician and then-Chief of Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Preventative Medicine in San Diego, was stumped when 55% of the 1,500 people who were enrolled in his weight-loss clinic every year left before completing the program. So he began to interview those who had dropped out of the program and discovered that many of them had suffered traumatic events in their lifetime.

“Another piece of the puzzle dropped into place during an interview with another clinic dropout, a woman who had been raped when she was 23. In the year after the attack, she gained 105 pounds. ‘As she was thanking me for asking the question,’ says Felitti, ‘she looks down at the carpet, and mutters, ‘Overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.'‘ Felitti began to realize that obese people didn’t see their fat as a problem. For many, it was a solution.” (1).

Felitti ended up developing what’s known as the ACE Score - Adverse Childhood Events. These include everything from verbal, physical and sexual abuse to having an alcoholic parent, losing a parent through divorce, having a family member in prison, having an abused mother or having a mentally ill parent.

“Think of it as a cholesterol score for childhood toxic stress. You get one point for each type of trauma. The higher your ACE score, the higher your risk of health and social problems.”

Felitti continued to research his ideas on a larger scale into the late 1900s and early 2000s. Around the same time, neurobiologists were researching the connection between childhood trauma and chronic illness. Piece together the ACE Study and neuroscience of childhood trauma and you get a compelling story:

“Children with toxic stress live their lives in fight, flight or fright (freeze) mode. They respond to the world as a place of constant danger. With their brains overloaded with stress hormones and unable to function appropriately, they can’t focus on schoolwork. They fall behind in school or fail to develop healthy relationships with peers or create problems with teachers or principals because they are unable to trust adults. With failure, despair, and frustration pecking away at their psyches, they find solace in food, alcohol, tobacco, methamphetamines, inappropriate sex, high-risk sports, and/or work. They don’t regard these coping methods as problems. They see them as a way to obtain relief and to escape from depression, anxiety, anger, fear and shame. In other words, a solution, not a problem.”

Today you can even find information about this topic on WebMD, which I was both surprised and delighted about. The article, titled “With Stress and Trauma Come Excess Weight in Women”, looks at new research illuminating this connection. The study looked at 22,000 middle aged and older women. 23% of participants were obese. Participants who reported more than one traumatic life event were 11% more likely to be obese, while women who reported 4+ negative life events in the previous 5 years were 36% more likely to be obese.

Psychological stress and trauma is not something that’s typically addressed in weight loss programs. Patients are told to eat less and move more (which we know doesn’t work). Holistic nutrition - which takes into account movement, daily stressors and management of this stress - takes it a step further, but it’s still not addressing what could potentially be the root cause of so many people’s health and weight challenges.

In the 1980s, a woman named Dr. Candace Pert discovered neuropeptides, which she called “molecules of emotion”. Neuropeptides act as messengers between the brain and the immune system. This finding supported the idea that thoughts and emotions directly impact the physical body and our health. Her research was extremely controversial, and she was a badass scientist who did not get the credit she deserves (literally, she got screwed over by a former mentor). I’ll link to her book under “Resources” at the end of this article.

But this is basically just hard science that appeases our Western science-driven minds on a topic that traditional medicine systems have known for years. Emotions are a huge part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Each emotion is tied to a different organ and it’s recognized that an excess of certain emotions can causes imbalances in the organs and if sustained over time, the whole body, which leads to disease and illness.

For example, in TCM anger is associated with the liver. Let’s say someone is still angry at a parent for abandoning them, and they’ve been carrying this unprocessed emotion for many years. They may start experiencing symptoms of a rise in Qi (pronounced “chi” - Qi is life energy) such as headaches, migraines, high blood pressure, heart palpitations, insomnia, red and blotchy skin and excessive thirst - all symptoms of a liver imbalance (2).

Can you imagine an unprocessed emotion such as anger in addition to all the toxicity our livers are experiencing? No wonder the body breaks down and gets sick!

According to ancient TCM wisdom (and many other mind-body systems like Ayurveda and Yoga - and Dr. Candace Pert!) the most powerful technique is “letting go”. Feel an emotion, experience it in your body and let it flow through you. It’s easier said than done, and it takes practice. If it were really that easy, we wouldn’t be in the collective physical and mental health criss that we are in.

As Felitti discovered in his study, for his participants the weight they carried was not the problem, it was the solution. Putting on weight is a physical protection from being seen, an insulation from difficult emotions, a way to deflect people’s attention, attraction, and love. It’s a way to avoid being vulnerable in a world that makes it terrifying to be vulnerable - especially if you’ve already been hurt (physically or emotionally). For most people this happens at a subconscious level.

According to Andrea Bell, LCSW, she’s heard many responses such as this: “When I lost weight, I constantly felt vulnerable. Like everyone was looking at me and could see right to my core. When I’m fat, I’m invisible.” (3).

Geneen Roth also addresses this issue in her work. Her book, “Women, Food and God” is a must-read for anyone who has struggled with their weight. She explores the relationship between our beliefs, our experiences, how and what we choose to eat - and how that manifests for us physically. She has written several books and leads retreats on the topic.

If we are interested in finding out what we actually believe - not what we think, not what we say, but what our souls are convinced is the bottom-line truth about life and afterlife - we need go no further than the food on our plates.
- Geneen Roth

When addressing the topic of weight loss, we have to look beyond just the food that we’re eating and the movement that we’re doing. We need to look at toxicity, like we discussed in Part I. And we need to look at our emotional state. We need to reflect on our life and figure out where we are still holding on to emotions, grudges, feelings that aren’t serving us anymore. Many of us have had to stuff down emotions for one reason or another, or maybe our families didn’t talk about uncomfortable things. Most people don’t have the tools or anyone in their lives who has the tools - to process unpleasant emotions.

This is me after crying my way through some of my feelings. Crying is an amazing and effective way to relieve stress, flush cortisol from your system and process your emotions.

The mechanism of weight gain in relation to trauma and unprocessed emotions is a little different for everyone. Maybe the weight gain is seemingly inexplicable, happening on some cellular level that is hard to identify. Maybe it’s high levels of cortisol surging through our bodies for years. Stress wrecks our microbiomes, so that could be contributing. Eating food for comfort. Drinking to excess to numb emotions. Regardless of the mechanism, if you don’t get to the underlying root cause, which is the unprocessed emotion or trauma, you won’t be successful long term with weight loss.

A few personal anecdotes: my brother and I both gained a lot of weight around the time of our parents’ divorce. Some of mine was from puberty, but there was no doubt that both of us were seeking comfort from food at the time. My junior year of college, I was abroad in Paris and experienced the most painful breakup of my life. I gained weight that year. Perhaps it was from all the French food and the excess of alcohol, both mechanisms for me escaping my feelings. And there have been blips over the years - times where all of a sudden I seem to put on 5 or 10 pounds that suddenly won’t go away and amazingly, it’s almost always linked to some emotion I’m hanging on to, TIGHTLY. It’s resentment or stress or anger. And as soon as I get through that emotion, the weight drops away. It’s truly interesting to observe and experience.

*Please note, traumas and unprocessed emotions are not the cause for weight loss resistance for everyone. I simply want to highlight an overlooked aspect that could be affecting some people. In any case, extra weight or not, dealing with your emotional health is crucial to physical health and wellbeing.

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Working Through Emotions

Meditation + spending time in nature are two of my favorite ways to keep my emotional health in check.

• Get used to feeling your feelings - this is the most simple and basic way to process your emotions. Often times as soon as we feel something uncomfortable come up, we distract ourselves - that might look like eating, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, having sex. It might be as innocent as watching TV or going out with friends - but those are distractions, too. All you have to do is be present with your emotions. Notice how they feel in your body. Cry if you need to, scream, punch a pillow, listen to sad or angry music. The point is to allow yourself to feel the emotion, let it move through your body. And it will pass, and when it does - let it go. This sounds easier than it is. It takes practice and commitment.

• Movement - moving your body is one of the best ways to move energy and process emotion through your body. Any kind of movement will work - yoga, walking, biking, crossfit, running, weightlifting, dancing, hiking, climbing. I find yoga to be especially potent for unlocking emotions that we store in our body. I’ve cried my way through more than a few yoga classes.

• Write about it - writing down your feelings is an amazing tool to help you process them. I’ve been journaling since I was seven and there are times in my life where my journal saved me. You can say whatever you want, you don’t have to worry about anybody judging you. I’ve had many epiphanies while journaling.

• Meditation - the practice of being still and quiet sounds easy, but so many of us resist it. Having a regular meditation practice helps us to notice our thoughts and feelings, without being ruled by them. It also helps connect us with our intuition. If you’re a beginner, start small with just 5 minutes a day and see if you can work your way up to 20. A regular meditation practice has had a profound impact on my reactivity, anxiety and general attitude towards life.

• Seek support - find people in your life that you trust and can talk to about your feelings. Having a support system is great, but sometimes we need professionals and there is no shame in that. Work with a mental health professional who can help you process old traumas and navigate any emotional concerns you might have.

*Please note, I am not a doctor or a mental health professional. All these suggestions are from my own personal experience, experiences of other people in my life or my own research.

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Resources

• Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child - this book was a game changer for me. It illuminated the many ways I was acting out in my adult life as a result of experiences in my childhood. This was really the first book that got me doing emotional and spiritual work.

• Women Food and God - such a great book for anyone who’s been struggling with their weight and can’t seem to nail down why.

• Molecules of Emotion - written by Dr. Candace Pert, who discovered neuropeptides and basically proved that our emotions impact our health. Not only a story about a badass woman scientist, but also a peek into the early science of mind-body medicine.

• The Biology of Belief - this book is still on my list, but Bruce Lipton is one of the original proponents of the idea that our thoughts can affect our biology.

• The Untethered Soul - he talks a lot about the process of allowing your emotions to move through your body, with a larger focus on working on your relationship with your inner self and your experience of the world around you.

• Heal (documentary) - a relatively new documentary about the power of our mind and our thoughts on the healing process. Totally fascinating.

Weight Loss: Two Major Overlooked Components (Part I) - Toxicity

Weight loss is a multi-BILLION dollar industry. It seems that most people we know are trying to lose weight, different diets are common topics of conversation and it’s a running joke that everyone’s New Year’s Resolution to hit the gym and eat better fizzles out by February.

This craze isn’t unwarranted. As of 2016, 39.8% of us were considered obese - about 93 million Americans (1). If we add into that number those that are overweight (but not clinically obese), the number becomes even higher. If we continue on the health trajectory that we’re currently on, over 95% of Americans will be overweight or obese in just two decades! (2).

Prevalence of Self-Reported Obesity Among U.S. Adults by State and Territory, BRFSS, 2017

There’s much debate over what kind of diet is best for weight loss - low-carb, keto, high-carb low-fat, vegan, etc. This post will not be discussing different diets as they relate to weight loss. Everyone knows that food is of the utmost importance when it comes to maintaining health, but everybody is different and one person’s style of eating is not necessarily the best for someone else. In a nut shell, eating real, whole, un-processed foods is going to be your best bet for maintaining a healthy weight (but this will look slightly different for everyone).

Environmental pollution is hard to escape nowadays.

I want to to talk about a few things that I believe are majorly overlooked when it comes to losing weight. The first thing I’m going to be diving into today is toxicity.

What do I mean by toxicity? Our liver has the very important job of filtering any toxins that come into our body - that is, substances that are not found in nature and that our body can’t use for energy or for nurturing cells or repairing tissue.

Our modern environment is LOADED with toxins and we encounter them in ways we don’t even realize. Environmental pollution from cars and planes is everywhere, especially in more urban areas.

Our household products contain tons of chemicals that are dangerous to us - including chemical cleaners, laundry detergent, dryer sheets, etc. The chemicals in laundry linger on our clothes, which touch our skin all day, meaning we’re constantly being physically exposed to chemicals.

The personal care product industry is a nightmare. This includes shampoo, body wash, lotion, deodorant, hair products and make up products. These products all contain tons of toxic chemicals and “fragrance” that are linked to asthma, cancer, and infertility. Over the past two decades, the European Union has banned 1,400 chemicals from personal care products. The US has only banned 30 (3). Our skin is our largest organ and what we apply topically ends up inside of us.

Plastic is everywhere and contains a compound known as BPA, which you’ve probably heard of. BPA is an endocrine disrupter, meaning it interferes with your body’s normal hormone production. We store our food in plastic, most of our household and personal care products come in plastic, our kids play with plastics toys… Just take a look around your home and notice how much plastic there is!

And then there’s our food. Most of the food that’s accessible and affordable is processed “food-like items”. There are tons of preservatives, artificial colors, artificial flavors, gums, pesticides, etc. that make their way into our food supply. These are not ingredients normally found in nature and our body has to filter them out.

So when you think about all of these products that you encounter everyday, multiple times a day - your body has a big job to do. Your liver is working overtime to keep you safe and healthy and frankly, for a lot of us, it can’t keep up. Throw in drinking alcohol regularly and your liver is downright dog-tired.

So what happens when the liver is overburdened? It needs to divert some of the toxins to a safe holding place until it has enough energy to properly filter and excrete them. Know where that safe holding place is? Fat cells.

Fat cells can act as a holding chamber - a place where toxins can hang out and not cause any immediate damage in the body. They increase in size as more and more toxins are stored there.

So when you start to gain weight, one of the things that could be happening is that your body is trying to protect you from a toxic load that your liver can’t handle.

When the toxins just keep coming in, your body never really has a chance to get to those extra toxins stored in fat cells - so the cycle continues and you might continue to gain weight.

Losing this kind of weight can be difficult because your body doesn’t WANT to release those toxins back into your body because there’s a potential they can damage your cells. It’s hard to get them to budge! But it is possible.

Another thing that’s important to mention is that many of these chemicals and toxins interfere with regular hormone activity. Hormones dictate most of what’s happening in our body, including our weight and hunger/satiety signals. I won’t go into all the nitty-gritty details here, but making sure your hormones are happy and balanced is crucial for weight maintenance, no matter your age.

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So what can you do to reduce your toxic load?

Just say no to conventional household cleaners and opt for more natural options.

• Look at your food first. Start reading ingredient labels if you’re not already accustomed to it. If there’s an ingredient that you can’t identify, it’s best to pass. Opt for fruits and vegetables, good quality animal products, beans, legumes and whole grains. There are better options hitting our shelves, but most of what’s out there is still full of artificial ingredients and preservatives that our body can’t use.
  

• Opt for organic. Organic foods don’t use toxic chemical pesticides and are therefore easier on your liver. Prioritize organic animal products (this means that the animals get organic feed free of pesticides - and you are what you eat, eats). The Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 List can help you prioritize which fruits and veggies to buy organic - awesome for if you’re on a budget. I use this list as my guide all the time.
  

• Drink less alcohol. I’m not saying you have to never drink again - but be mindful of how much you’re consuming. Your liver needs to process alcohol and in combination with all of the other things I’ve listed, it might be too much for your body to process. Clean up the other areas of your life and it shouldn’t be a big deal to enjoy a drink a few times a week.
  

• Clean house. Swap out household cleaners for more natural products. Vinegar diluted with water (add some essential oil drops if you want) makes an excellent, inexpensive all-purpose cleaner. Baking soda is great for scrubbing sinks, toilets and tubs. Opt for natural, fragrance-free laundry detergents (or just use a mix of borax, baking soda and Dr. Bronner’s like me) and skip the dryer sheets all together. You could use wool balls with essential oils in place of the dryer sheets if you want.
  

• Use less plastic. Store food in glass tupperware or mason jars. Invest in reusable bags like Stasher (which will replace those sandwich-sized bags you use) and use reusable cloth produce bags instead of plastic when buying produce. Buy food in glass when you can. This is also great for the environment!
  

• Pay attention to personal care. This is the hardest category FOR SURE. It’s hard to find good, clean products that actually work. For makeup and skincare, Beautycounter is really effective and is totally on par with other higher end skincare/makeup products. Whole Foods is a really good resource since they ban certain ingredients in the products they carry, so the pool you’re choosing from is already several steps above conventional products. For things like shampoo, conditioner, body wash and body lotion, these are some of my favorite brands: Acure, Avalon Organics, Everyone for Everybody and Alaffia.

It might seem overwhelming at first, but start small. Just swap out one product. As you run out of things, replace them with a cleaner alternative. It’s taken me years to get to where I am now.

I recommend that everyone become more aware of their toxic load and where toxins are hiding in their food and products. It’s going to be crucial for our long term health and wellness. If weight loss is your goal, take an investigative look into where these toxins show up in your life and take some of that toxic load off your body. Combined with a whole-foods diet and movement, this will help support your weight loss now and your health and longevity for a long time to come.

Full transparency: this blog post contains affiliate links. If you use them, I might be rewarded a commission of the sale (at no extra cost for you). Please note that I only recommend brands that I personally use and love and I always have my readers' best interest at heart.