Since, mid-June, we’ve been using recipes and meal plans from the Taste of Home Comfort Food Diet cookbook series to limit our calorie intake to 1200-1400 calories per day. I had put on about 8-9 pounds since my shoulder surgery back in mid-November followed by a diagnosis of frozen shoulder post-surgery. Ugh! No exercise for me for many months. I finally finished physical therapy and was okayed to do limited non-weight-bearing exercises thereafter, so June was the magic month to get back to eating right and exercising at least 5 days/week.
Along with doing YouV2 workouts from BeachBody on Demand, I have been making 3 fabulous meals a day from scratch using these awesome meal plans from those old cookbooks I bought many years ago. They are so cheap nowadays, and you can still order them from Amazon. They are golden, because they make meal planning so easy! There are 6 weeks of suggested meal plans in the front of each cookbook.
Since only 3 of the 5 of us eat together regularly any more, it’s easy to cook and meal prep just 2-3 times a week and use leftovers for the days in between. My adult son is rarely home and mostly eats out with his girlfriend. My teenage daughter is so picky and generally difficult that she basically refuses to eat anything I make, even when it’s something she likes. So that leave my husband, myself, and our 12.5 year old son eating dinner most nights.
I’m happy to say that I’ve lost about 5-6 pounds so far. I’m exercising Monday-Friday for 30 minutes doing cardio/dance routines that don’t require any weights or significant weight-bearing exercises. It’s been a great way to transition back into exercising again without overtaxing my frozen shoulder. The meals have been great, and investing in a couple of sets of meal prep containers from Walmart have come in handy in portioning up meals to label and stock in the fridges for 2-3 days at a time.
For meal planning, I’m really *loving* using Pepperplate. I first mentioned that service back in 2018 when it was a totally free program. I started using it again in June when I began my current weight-loss journey, and I quickly discovered it’s now a paid service that costs $2.99/month. I was skeptical of the fee at first, especially since I had used it before for free. But I quickly discovered that the service has improved SO much that it’s well worth the few extra dollars to organize my meal plans and recipes all in one place. I can import my recipes from other sites, tweak them to my preferences and save them with my alterations and notes, and then link them to menu plans I set up in the program. Then when I take my tablet to the kitchen to cook, I can open up the app, pull up my menus for the day, and click the menu I want to cook. Then the “cooking” mode shows me all the recipe tabs across the top so I can toggle between my main entree, side dishes, and dessert as I prepare my meal and even set separate timers at the same time for each meal! It’s so handy. I never print off recipes any more, and I can have all of my timers in one place attached to each recipe and simultaneously monitor all of them!
In addition, I can pull up the recipes and add them to my shopping list. This shows me all the ingredients and their required amounts, and I can uncheck any boxes of items I already have on hand and just add the things I need to buy to my shopping list. Then the list automatically sorts the items by category to make store shopping fast, grouping similar items together. After adding all of my recipes to the shopping list, if the same item is needed for multiple recipes, it groups them together and adds up the total amount needed for that item. Easy peasy! In addition, any changes I make to my meal planner are automatically synced between the website and my phone or tablet apps, so the same information is updated everywhere all at once. I can pull up my shopping list on my phone while I’m shopping or view a recipe if I need to reference something with just a couple of clicks. I love it!
Just for fun, I want to share the recipe I made for lunch today. It came from Taste of Home’s Comfort Food Diet Cookbook: Quick & Easy Favorites. It’s a made-from-scratch Chicken Alfredo Veggie Pizza. It was a labor of love, but it was SO good and made quite a large pizza! One slice was plenty filling, and all the fresh veggies were so good!
The other cookbooks I recommend in this series are the original Comfort Food Diet Cookbook, and the Comfort Food Diet Cookbook: Family Favorites. If you get your hands on those 3 cookbooks, you won’t have any repeated recipes, and you’ll get 6 weeks’ worth of suggested meal plans for breakfast, lunch, dinner, desserts, and snacks in each one. The recipes are all so good, and many of the have indeed become family favorites we’ve made again and again over the years!
Happy meal planning!
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