Benefits of Meal Planning

April 19th, 2024

Does meal planning have real benefits? As a tool and guide, there are benefits to planning out your meals as it allows you to think about what you will be eating and it gives you an opportunity to structure a meal around your dietary needs.

In our case, this has been helpful when making meals for my grandma. Sometimes, I have a particular meal in mind and other times I just write down ingredients I intend to purchase that fit within the diet, and then I plan from there. How detailed you need to be depends on how strict your needs are. The more strict the specifications, the more planning you're likely to have to do. Take our situation for example, the questions we asked ourselves are personalized to the beginning of our journey to provide appropriate meals for someone with CKD (Chronic Kidney Disease). Naturally, your questions will differ from ours as you begin your journey, below are some of our question as an example:

• Does she have yogurt for her breakfast?

• What is for lunch?

• Are there plenty of cut up fruits and vegetables to eat as snacks?

• Are the other snacks a reasonable quantity to keep her fed?

• Are these snacks too salty or sugary?

• Is dinner going exceed new daily allowances that we are now following?

• What herbs and spices do I need to flavor the meal?

• Is this enough protein or too much?

• What combination of fruits and vegetables can she have today?

Write a list of questions that you can ask yourself when it comes to planning. Even if you don’t have a diet such as the DASH diet, what are your goals? Quantify what they are and craft questions that will help you achieve those goals.

Example of Priorities:

• 1,500mg sodium

• 2,000-2,300mg potassium

• 800-1,000mg phosphorous

• 2,000mg calcium

• 50g sugar

• Exercise more.

• Build strength.

• Moderate protein.

• Drink 70oz water

From your list of priorities, you can start planning meals. With a limit on phosphorus and calcium, ask yourself: can I have grilled cheese sandwiches every day? In this case, it is not the ideal food that to be eating on the daily. Do I love a good grilled cheese, absolutely! Is it my grandma’s favorite? Also, yes. So, what did we do?

We scheduled a grilled cheese day into our week. Now you may be asking yourself, how can you do that? First, you should not have bread at your other meals that day. Instead, reserve your bread serving for your beloved grilled cheese, and personally we love a good sourdough over plain white bread. The same goes for cheese and that means you should try to limit to the amount dairy products that you intake for that same day. Dairy is high in phosphorous and as you can see from the priority list above that isn’t something that she can, or should have a lot of in her daily diet.

The nephrologist recommended that her diet needed to consist of more fresh fruits and vegetables. Prior to this snacking was about all she did in a day to a point where my uncle was concerned that she wasn’t even eating lunch. Now having snacks is not the problem, it is even recommended to help maintain consistent blood sugar when on the diet. It is what you are eating and how much that truly matters. Stock up on snacks that fit into your plan and from there portion them out. Our issue with snacking was incredibly tough to start cracking due to the grossly high volume of sugar in Grandma’s snacks prior to starting the new diet.

What helps when you are trying to change your snacking habits? Of course, make another list. I find that satisfying replacements are difficult to figure out; what we ended up doing was an exercise, first explaining the change that needed to happen and then created a baseline. The exercise for figuring out the baseline was literally lining up all of the snack options and dividing them into piles. There was a pile for foods of interest and one for disinterest. What did she want to eat was our starting place. In the end, the pile of interest was comprised of every cookie, candy, and sugary snack possible. You may be asking yourself, why does that matter?

According to the American Kidney Foundation, your kidneys no longer filter blood proficiently when CKD starts to develop and worsen. The kidneys’ lack of ability to filter out the waste in your blood can trickle down into other issues such as high urea content. This will start signaling your pancreas to stop producing insulin and therefore it is possible for CKD to cause diabetes. Again, this is something that the nephrologist intended to monitor, as the sugar levels in one of her tests was too high. In summary, we have had to eliminate the number of processed and high sugar snacks available in the house. We’ll come back to healthy snacks in a later article and provide ideas that have helped us maintain this lifestyle.

The overall idea of meal planning may make you cringe. It feels so restrictive and for those that creatively cook this seems so rigid. To those of you, who like myself, do not strictly follow recipes don’t let this be limiting or intimidating. I mentioned earlier in this post that another option is to create a list of acceptable ingredients that fit into the food you either want to eat or have to start eating. For instance, I can prepare varying dishes with three or four of the same ingredients. Using kitchen staples, frozen (unsalted/no sauce) vegetables, spices and herbs; I can change the direction I go with a dish I am creating. Keep in mind how much is too much of a particular ingredient based on its chemical makeup. I like to space things out, so I tend to prep the ingredients for the current meal and future meals. Certain ingredients are good in lower quantities and it may be a day before I use it again to avoid having too much, for instance, potassium. The other reason is to allow for variety in your diet, this way you are able to get several types of nutrients and be able to eat a bit more adventurously.

If you are a recipe follower, check out what your ingredients contain as far as potassium and phosphorous go. You may want to consider using substitutions as necessary to keep levels down for someone that has CKD. Remember with sodium that 1 teaspoon contains the maximum amount of sodium that a healthy adult may have in a day and for any person with kidney or heart issues, this amount would be closer to 1/2 a teaspoon. Check to see how much salt is in the recipe and how many servings it is supposed to produce. Consider swapping the salt for other herbs and spices instead.

Remember to find the joy in cooking, even if you have diet restrictions and need to meal plan. Make it an experience that brings you something positive, instead of dreading it.

~Ginny