• Guidelines help us because of the simplicity they add to this (what can seem confusing) process.  It’s just like in school when your teacher would give you a project, the first thing they would handout is a sheet of requirements that you must follow!  Therefore, you didn’t have to question whether or not your project was headed in the right direction or not, you knew when you compared it to the list of requirements.  
• So to stay consistent with tracking and planning your meals you will need to make some of your own guidelines that help this fit your lifestyle in the easiest way possible.  This is how we make things simple, we add basic guidelines that take away majority of the questions
• Remember the mental chatter we talked about back in coaching module #2 that may come up when you start tracking which brings me to my next area of improvement…

You’ve already been shopping and preparing food ahead of time so now it’s just a matter of factoring in that you’re measuring this food.  That being said with this being a new process it may be easier to…

• Prepare your food the night before if you have to bring it to school/work.  Since measuring takes time and life happens (who woulda thought) eliminate the possibility of not having enough time by doing it the night before
• Put your food into your food log the night before.  This is another way you can ‘plan’ your day ahead and decide if you need to take time the night before or morning of to prepare some meals
• Go as far as measuring/portioning out the foods you eat on a daily basis at the beginning of the week!  If I know I am eating 4 oz of chicken two times a day for 7 days, I will pre-bag 14 bags of 4oz chicken.

Keep it Simple Stupid. We are all familiar with that saying, right?  I want to ingrain this concept into your head! Make things simple, and don’t overthink this process – the stress of overthinking things causes more damage than small changes that may occur when #lifehappens

Check these out:

• So you go to work and a co-worker asks you to go out to lunch.  You already have your meal packed what do you do?  bring your pre-made food to lunch? NO!! You go out to lunch and order something that has similar calories/macros to your lunch!  Remember, you can just double check your app to see the kind of basic meal you can order. If you’re using MFP you can even look up meals at most major restaurants. IT’S THAT SIMPLE!
• It’s Thursday night and you realize right before bed that you ran out of sweet potatoes for your meals the next day, what do you do?  You pick something else you already that is similar in calories.  Maybe some rice, oatmeal, or rice cakes – no it won’t be 100% the same but it fits the bill for subbing your carbohydrate need!
• You unexpectedly decide to have a cupcake at the lunch meeting for work.  Do you throw the day out the window? Eat 2 more cupcakes? Nope! Just check your all to see about how much the overall macros were for that cupcake, and take them out of your next closest meal.  You don’t have to be perfect 100% of the time just consistent. 

The goal of this process is awareness. We want you to begin to recognize the contents of the foods you’re eating. What trends are you noticing?  A cupcake, for example, is going to mainly be carbohydrates. So, we want you to recognize this and do your best to exchange macros for macros instead of seeing everything as equal Calories. Does that make sense? If not, reach out!! We want you to really learn these concepts and we understand that they’re not always as simple as they seem.