20Think you’re too busy to try out the Paleo Plan Meal Plan? Here’s my advice to another reader about that…
My wife and I both looked at your website and are very interested in starting the Paleo Plan Meal Plan. I wanted to speak to someone about the complexity of the diet and see if this is something we can do with our schedules.My wife and I are both Police Officers. She works four days a a week 10-15 hours a day, I work three days a week 12-15 hours a day. We really need solid fuel foods and things we can munch on throughout the day/night we are working. Things that will stay edible in a lunch pale in a patrol car for 12 hours. Neither of us have food allergies. Being recently married, we want to get that headstart of getting the “Married muffin” as I call it. After speaking with my wife, we both decided we really want to make some lifestyle changes before we start having kids so we can raise our kids eating the right foods and steer away from the processed crap foods.
Please contact me and let me know if your plan will work for our type of schedule.
Respectfully,
Travis
Hi Travis,
Congrats on even considering making this switch! I hope you can make it work for you and your wife in order to ward off the “married muffin” ;) Here’s my advice.
If you really want it to work for your schedule, it definitely can. You will do well to work together on the cooking, since you have different schedules and sometimes one of you will have more time to cook than the other. Your lunches will most often consist of leftovers from dinner. I personally don’t mind cold leftovers, but you may feel differently about that. Some people like to heat up their leftovers, which I’m not sure is an option for you ever.
Anyway, other than that, you’ll have to cook your breakfast, which usually takes between 5 and 20 minutes. Then lunch is leftovers so no time cooking there. Snack is almost always something you make beforehand or just pull out of the pantry/fridge with no prep required (like jerky, fruit, veggies, pre-made chicken with avocado, etc.), and dinner is the one thing you’ll need to make every night.
So you can either make the dinners in bulk and freeze them on a night when you have time, then just heat them up when you get home at night. Or you can spend between 20 minutes and an hour cooking dinner every night.
We also have a “flex” schedule in the meal plan, which gives you one day a week “off” from the diet. That just means we provide you with a shopping list every week that excludes Friday’s meals (but you can take any day of the week off – not just Friday. So that helps give you a little leeway with your schedule to go out to eat one day or heat up a frozen pizza or something.
Oh, and one other thing. I wrote a blog post called “I Don’t Have Time for Paleo” here that talks about the ways you can make Paleo do-able, even with the busiest schedule. The comments on that post are really helpful, too.
I hope that helps, but please let me know if you have other questions!
Kindly,
Neely
