Jonathan Steedman (00:01.657)
All right, food groupies, we are chatting about, well, I am chatting about how I plan my week. So this podcast is all about me, me, me. No, the goal is that this is gonna give you some ideas and some inspiration. I do not expect you to do exactly what I do. I am not perfect, you are not perfect, that's okay. But hopefully a few ideas jump out at you you can steal some things to streamline your week and to make this go a lot better. These are definitely strategies that I've.

developed over the years, not just for myself, but working with, you know, thousands of people. So I'm sure you'll get something out of this. So it shouldn't take too long. The first unfortunate truth is you need to do some level of meal planning. I feel like it's a non-negotiable for virtually everyone. Now the scope of that planning and the

how intensely detailed that planning is, is going to differ from person to person. And it's also going to differ from where you're up to. So not to toot my own horn, I know a fair bit about nutrition. I'm pretty good at building meals on the fly. And so I can be a little more relaxed with my plan for the week because I know how to pivot. I know how to quickly throw together something. And so I might be a bit more casual and a bit more a bit.

a bit less specific with my planning versus someone who's maybe just building their nutritional habits for the first time, right? That being said, no matter how good I am at nutrition, it still takes bandwidth. And so I also make sure that particularly if I have a busy couple of weeks or a busy block coming up, I am more detailed with my planning. I leave less things to chance and I put less pressure on future Johnny to come up with a good dinner at 5 p.m., right? So.

Yeah, that would be the first thing is you do need to do some level of meal planning. It's a non-negotiable for everyone. If you don't, you are doing this thing on hard mode and eating healthily, taking care of yourself is hard enough as it is, I believe, particularly in this day and age and the food environment that we're in. So why would I make it even harder for myself? Right, so.

Jonathan Steedman (02:12.077)
What I do to make sure that happens is I do a little bit of habit stacking. If you've read Atomic Habits by James Clear, you would be familiar with habit stacking. I'm pretty sure he stole it from BJ Fogg. So I'm stealing it from James. And basically habit stacking is when you, it's a strategy that you can use to implement a habit that you're trying to build. Essentially you're taking the new habit and you're stacking, quote unquote, it on top of an existing habit.

Preferably a habit that is very reliable, you know, a lot of examples are brushing your teeth Hopefully you don't have to work too hard to remember to brush your teeth, right? So that would be a habit You could use that habit to take your supplements if you're taking any supplements, right? And because maybe you're forgetting to take supplements, but the brushing of the teeth reminds you to take the supplements So personally for myself, I use my morning coffee as a trigger to meal plan now I don't meal plan every day. So I actually specifically use my Tuesday morning coffee

that is when I do it. I have my coffee, takes me like five, 10 minutes to map out my week and then I'm done and I can build a bit of a shopping list from there. So that Tuesday morning coffee is a very reliable habit. It's either I'm drinking that or I'm dead. So it always happens and then I use it to trigger planning my week. And that's another important thing to note as well. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I actually don't need to meal plan on the weekend. I know that for Monday to Friday work is that seems to be what we default to, but I actually found out that I'm

I find, particularly with young family, I'm actually less busy during the week than I am on the weekend. And I found that Tuesdays were a quiet early day and made way more sense. And so when I broke down the stupid rule in my brain of, but you got to plan on the weekend, and I moved it into the week, things went heaps better. I actually do the same thing for any kind of meal prepping as well. I've moved it into blocks into my week. So maybe, I don't know, if you're struggling to prep on the weekend or plan on the weekend, stop trying to do it on the weekend and try doing it during the week.

So that's the first thing. The next thing is like having some kind of note system to help. That's probably, there's lots of apps and grocery shopping list apps and meal planning apps and all these things that I'm sure are wonderful. I personally use the notes function on my phone for meal planning. It's a shared note with my wife. That's largely, she doesn't help meal plan. It's largely just so she stops asking me what's for dinner. She can just look. But you know, a shared note is a really, really good way of doing that. A recent thing which I've done, which is

Jonathan Steedman (04:36.075)
broken my brain is I have, again, I'm an Apple fan, but I'm sure there's some less good Android option that you can implement. I use the reminders app and I use the shopping list function on the reminders app because it means I can literally say, I'm probably gonna trigger it now. Hey Siri, add bread to my shopping list, right? The reason I love that so, did that come through? Anyway, that was Siri adding bread to my shopping list. The reason I love this so much

is I can use my watch to add stuff to my shopping list. My Apple watch runs my whole life in the best possible way. means less stuff lives in my brain and more stuff lives on my watch. But I have found a lot of the time I was using Apple Notes for my shopping list, but you can't touch that on your watch. I'd need my phone, but I'd be like out for a walk or I'd be driving or I'd be in the shower or I'd be away from my phone, which I'm trying to do more and more. But then I'd be like, remember next time I'm back at my phone, I got to add this thing to my shopping list. And then I would just forget.

I don't need to do that anymore. I literally say what I said before into my watch and no matter where I am, it adds it straight into that reminder list. I can then share that reminder list like I have with my wife and so she can do the exact same thing. So we have the shared shopping. It's so good. It's so good. So yeah, I know there's probably other fancy apps out, fancier apps out there, but I have, that function has blown my mind. It's only, I'm only a couple of months in, but it has made things so, so, so much better. So anyway, that.

You need some kind of meal planning. You need some kind of system, whether that be paper, I guess. I love writing on paper, but it just doesn't really work for planning and then shopping lists, I don't think. Particularly if you're in a family with other people, it's nice to have shared stuff, so I do that. Another huge thing I do is I online shop religiously. I try to go to the grocery shop as little as possible, even though I love grocery shopping. It just, A, takes so much more time out of my day, so much more time.

even though I'm pretty good at it and pretty quick, you know, it's pretty hard to like, I live 10 minutes away from my coals. So that's 10 minutes there, maybe two minutes to park and then 10 minutes to get home. We're at 22 minutes. Even if I'm absolutely flying, my weekly shop's probably going to take me 20 to 30 minutes. That's an hour of my time, right? Whereas I can probably online shop in about 10 minutes and I can do that on the couch whilst watching the office. So, so much nicer. And then it comes to my house and sure.

Jonathan Steedman (07:02.987)
Sometimes I have to pay for delivery, but $7, I am lucky enough to earn more than $7 an hour. And so for me, that is paying someone $7 to deliver my shopping rather than spending an hour going and doing it myself. Very fair. I kind of go to the fruit and veg shop a lot, as often as I can by myself, because online delivery for fruit and veg is atrocious. But for the most part, it still saves me a ton of time.

You also have the added bonus of you're less likely to buy crap you don't need. know, because you don't see that stuff at the end of the aisle. You don't see that stuff at the checkout that's with the big yellow tickets. So I find online shopping, A, saves me a ton of time and B, allows me to be a bit more on point with my decision making. One other hack. Guys, if you are meal planning, plan, did you actually know this might be news to some of you? There are actually seven days in the week, not five.

And so if you're planning out your week, don't plan Monday through Friday. Plan Monday through Sunday. Plan all seven days. Now that doesn't mean that you must religiously stick to that seven day plan, okay? If you'd like to be relaxed over the weekend, that's fine. Leave intentional gaps in the plan, but don't leave Saturday and Sunday blank. Maybe Saturday night you're like, I'm going somewhere for dinner, I'm doing something for dinner, I might get takeout, I might cook, I have no idea. Great, leave that blank.

but breakfast and lunch on Saturday probably don't need to be blank. So many times clients get caught like stuck with no options because they smashed it during the week because they planned and then on the weekend they haven't planned. So still plan over the weekend. Like I said, it can be a different looking plan. It can be more relaxed. You can intentionally leave gaps but you probably don't need to leave the whole weekend blank. The last thing I always, always, always, always do is I have a bunch of frozen

or pantry options on hand. So basically what I'm saying is I have a bunch of zero prep shelf stable or frozen options on hand that allow me to build meals really quickly. So if I do need to pivot, if I have inadvertently forgotten something or the online shop hasn't brought something or I don't know, I've got a meal that I've got to cover, I always know I've got something in the pantry and the fridge for that. I went to open my Instagram, but I've blocked it at the moment because I'm trying to work. And so I can't remember the posts, but there are.

Jonathan Steedman (09:26.474)
a couple of posts on my page around, hang on, I'm opening Notion now, which is, got all my posts in it. Where are we? Just, this is quality podcasting, isn't it? Good Lord, I'm so sorry. If I type in stable, no, that's not it. Frozen. look, there, there, there you go. August, nope, July. What am I doing? It doesn't matter. I have a bunch of Frozen meal options.

have a quick scroll and you'll able to find them and a bunch of pantry staples and a bunch of backup meals. If you can't find them, send me a message, say, hey, listen to the podcast, where those are, and I'll send them through to you. But definitely always have those, right? We want to have a really robust plan and then we also want to have a plan for when that really robust falls apart. So if you do all that, does that make sense? I think I missed a word in that sentence. Anyway.

I need a coffee. I hope you've taken a couple of things away from that. If you have, I'd love to hear what you've taken away from it and how you found it has helped. It always helps me build new things, build new tools, build new ideas and things that help people in the future. So if something has resonated, let me know. Otherwise, I'll chat to you next time.