Health for life

As with war, politics, and solving a Scooby Doo mystery, when it comes to saving cash and eating well, nothing is more important than having a plan. Grocery lists keep you from blowing dough on extraneous stuff. Price books give you the best possible food costs. Menu planners ensure you’re not scrambling to put dinner on the table, thus preventing dangerous bouts of crazy.

My own time-tested system combines a half-baked price book, hastily scrawled grocery lists, and yelling, “HON?! What are you in the mood for?” It works for now, but I’m thinking of going the pen-and-paper route. It’s working for Leigh, after all.

Fortunately, there are gazillions of downloadable menu planners, grocery lists, and price books all over the web. Unfortunately, many aren’t free, and involve some kind of weird sign-up or registration. Unless it’s for health insurance or Idol voting (Bowersox 4-evs), I hate doing that.

So, for your organizing pleasure, here are 36 free templates that’ll get you cooking. To know:

• There are no memberships or sign-ups required.
• All files are printable images, PDFs, or Excel spreadsheets.
• To make sure the sites were kosher, I downloaded/opened at least one form from each page. My computer has not virusized yet. (KNOCK ON WOOD.) Still, use at your own risk.
• Again: free.

If you’re craving more than a basic Word document, starred (*) entries go beyond the usual cells and tables. Their artsy graphic designs are Etsy worthy, and will look particularly cute hanging on your fridge.

Readers, if you know of any good templates/spreadsheets/whatever I missed, add ‘em in the comment section. Prettified ones will receive extra bonus points. (Meaning: a quiet “yay” in my small Brooklyn apartment.)

MULTIPLE RESOURCES
These websites include many different kinds of templates.

Better Budgeting
Basic weekly menu planner and weekly dinner planner, along with a grocery list organized by aisle.

Free Printable Grocery List
Dozens of grocery lists and menu planners, both blank and with pre-formatted checklists. Some have cute (but minimal) designs. Click on the sidebar and start printin’.

I’m an Organizing Junkie
Grocery list and weekly menu planner/grocery list combo. Formatted in boxes. A twist!

Keep and Share
Nice compilation of grocery lists for diet restrictions, including gluten-free, kosher, diabetic, lactose-free. Includes a pair of massive two-pagers, as well.

Mom’s Budget
Weekly and monthly meal planners, price logs, pantry inventories, and grocery lists in blue, green, orange, pink, and purple.

Money Saving Mom
Fourteen free downloads, including weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly menu planners as well as a master prep, ingredient, and shopping lists.


COMBINATIONS
Each of these single documents will do double-duty as say, a menu planner AND grocery list.

*A Feathered Nest
Menu planner/grocery list combo that’s super cute without being twee.

About.com
Weekly menu planner and shopping list.

*Carina Gardner
Anthropologie-esque weekly menu planner with a grocery list on the bottom. Nice! (Its the one pictured at the top.)

*Design Sponge
A weekly menu planner/grocery list combo, as well as blank and checklist-style grocery lists. Cute!

Organized Home
Weekly menu planner and shopping list

*The Project Girl
Menu planner and shopping list, with the best design out of everything here. Very pretty!

Saving Your Cents
Weekly menu planner and shopping list. Simple and clean. Use #1. (The others are already on this list.)


PRICE BOOKS
Excel documents unless otherwise noted.

Cheap Cooking
You have to do a little deleting here, but it should work otherwise.

It’s Your Money
A larger file requiring unzipping.

No Credit Needed
Uncomplicated and easy to figure out. My favorite of these options.

Organized Home
This one’s not an Excel spreadsheet. It’s a fill-in-the-blank-with-your-own-pen-style price book.


MENU PLANNERS

Busy Bee Lifestyle
Weekly planner with separate columns for kids and adults. With a picture of a bee! (Note: I like bees.)

*Disney Family Fun
Dinner planner only, but with a cute, kid-oriented design.

*From the Kitchen of…
Super fun weekly planner. Be aware that it’s a big file, and has to be unzipped. I don’t know why, but it reminds me a little of a Lynda Barry cartoon.

Home Life Weekly
Rainbow colored weekly planner.

The Home School Mom
Has one with a weekly activity planner on the side, and one without. Pretty basic.

Main Street Mom
Super, super basic design. But effective.

Meal Planning Mommies
Weekly plan with “I’m a meal planning mommy!” written across the top. Helpful if you forget who you are, not helpful if youre male.

Organized Home
Weekly menu planner made especially for notebooks.

*Petit Elefant
This one involves some re-sizing, but has a totally cute format and design.

Unclutterer
Available in spreadsheet or PDF form. Clean and efficient.

Vertex 42
Basic weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly menu planners in both portrait and landscape print styles.


GROCERY LISTS

Excel Template
Three printable spreadsheets of varying sizes, for general-to-specific shopping.

Mom Ready
Simple and straightforward checklist for your weekly trip.

Painted Gold
Simple blank list organized by department.

Pike’s Pickles
PDF files with both a blank list and formatted checklist.

Split Coast Stampers
Another checklist-style Excel spreadsheet. Also in PDF format if you scroll down a little further

Squawkfox
Landscape-style one-page checklist with many attractive boxes. Pretty thorough.

The Ultimatest Grocery List
Huge single-page checklist, with a massive bonus list for vegetarians! Maybe the best option if you’re looking for this kind of thing.

Vertex 42
Blank template organized by category. Handy.

Readers, whatchoo got? The comments are open!

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If you like this article, you might also enjoy:

• Cheap Healthy Good’s Ultimate Guide to Kitchen Equipment
• Information Central: 32 Free Food Charts, Checklists, and Wallet-Sized Guides
• Pantry of the Gods

In his PDF book, "Eat Stop Eat" Brad Pilon makes the following statement:

"While you may find this guideline overly simplistic at first, the truth is there is NO normal or perfect way to eat for weight loss. This is the great fallacy behind most diet books. The fact is, and always will be, it is calorie restriction that causes weight loss."

I am amazed that this statement is so amazing to me. I hope you are getting the double whammy that is in that statement. It does not say you have to count calories, he says you have to restrict them... in other words: eat less. I know. I know. Whats so unusual about that? Everybody knows that! If you want to lose weight you have to eat less. Point made. Point taken. Lose the food, lose the weight.

I have spent so much time trying to figure out what to eat to lose weight that this simple truth somehow whizzed right over my head. Brads statement brought it down in front of my eyes. I dont like to think of myself as "simple minded" but, darn, maybe I am. I worked hard to find a style of eating that would help me lose weight and what I really needed was a style of not eating. Oh my.

The "double" part is that eating "low carb" or "low fat" or "high protein" is not the point. The point is less food. What my mother used to say. All this time, Ive been avoiding it, but it turns out she was right. It is the one thing that works. Just eat smaller portions. It is not even important how much smaller, just smaller than what youve been eating. You dont need "guidelines" from someone else. Just make your portions smaller than what you usually eat. Start where you are and trim a little off the contents of the plate. Drink plenty of water, too.

Surprise. You dont need to fill up all the spaces in your stomach. Once it becomes a habit, it will not seem unusual or strange to you.

I think the thing I feared was not having food to eat. Or eating less. Or being deprived. Somehow. I know... I feared "hunger." Is that possible? Yes, I think it is. I feared being hungry. I dont know why... and Im not even interested in finding out why. Im just glad that Ive already discovered that "hunger" is nothing to fear!! That is the major lesson I learned from fasting. It is not the overpowering, all consuming, scary thing that I seemed to think it was. Hunger. Wow.  Starvation? Yes, that should be feared and worked against. But, simple ordinary every day hunger? What is there to fear in that. It is almost silly. Funny.

I worked so hard to avoid the fact of simply eating less that I went round in circles over and over again. I did not think I could control the quantity of food that I eat in a session, so avoided attempting something at which I believed I would fail. I believed I could not simply eat smaller portions and be satisfied. I was used to dealing with the eating machine which is the antithesis of portion control. The eating machine is portion out of control.

But Ive been fasting for 24 hour periods for a while now so I know I can do it and love it. Not that every time I try it, it is successful. Just today I was going to do a spur of the moment fast, but I petered out later and ate. But ESE is flexible and I know I can do it tomorrow and if I prepare for it, I will do it.

Fasting has shown me there is a different way to approach food and eating. You do know those are two different things. Food. And eating. Food is simply a substance. Eating is an act that is performed. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less.



The other day I had gotten out one of my mothers old dessert dishes (picture above). I dont remember what for. But as I walked across the floor I stopped and looked at the size of this tiny dish that had the name "dessert dish." It fit in the palm of my hand. I thought about the gargantuan bowls of ice cream I used to eat when I was a kid. I remember my Dad teasing that I would "make a good step mother" because I served everyone large portions. They never used them. And here in my hand was this tiny little cut glass dessert dish. If every dessert I had would fit in that small dish, I would probably be thin.

It is almost as if the size of the bowl creates the size of the person.

I was recently watching episodes of the BBC program call "Supersize vs. Super Skinny" where one humongous person and one tiny person swapped meals for a certain amount of time in what they call their feeding clinic. They have to sit across the table from one another, after preparing a meal from a day in their own food diary, and then when they sit down to eat, they trade meals. The big person eats the small persons meal and the small person eats the big persons meal for a few days in a row. 

They are both flabbergasted at what the other one eats and they have conversations about this experiment as they do it. Often the big person quickly eats the little persons meal and then sits and watches the tiny person struggle to eat their gigantic portions of food which they almost never finish. Each one feels responsible for the other ones discomfort. When they see how the other person has to struggle to do what they do on a regular basis, they begin to realize what they have been doing to themselves. The big person realizes just how unrealistically large their portions are. The thin person realizes that the tiny meals they eat are not enough for an adult to live on.

The supersize person gets a trip to America that the skinny person does not get. They go to visit a person who can be as much as a couple hundred pounds larger than they are for the purpose of seeing, for themselves, what the effects of continuing to pack on the pounds does to a human body. The people they visit often have many ailments and they often are not doing anything to curb their appetites and lose weight, although not all of them are like that. They suffer from immobility, pain, seeping legs, high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep apnea and all kinds of weight related problems. They often need help, just to go to the bathroom. This is the "wake up" call for the English participant. They get to be up close and personal with what it really means to continue doing what they are doing. It works. They get it.
 
From having watched many episodes this feeding clinic exercise seems to help the overly slim or super skinny person get in touch with their hunger, which for whatever reason, got turned off sometime in the past. When they return to the show about 8 weeks later they look more normal sized and not so skinny, even though they worked hard, ate lots, and put on about 3 pounds they look like theyve put on 15 or 20. The fat person also looks different. They often lose quite a bit of weight and feel very good about themselves and they look good too.  But... a year later the formerly super skinny person now looks like a normal human being, the fat person looks like a smaller fat person. Sometimes the "one year later" show has three of the participants back and very often it is two of the ormed super skinnies, and one of the somewhat smaller fat people. Makes me wonder if the fatties got lost somewhere, or put their weight back on again, so they are not on the show. They never say anything like that. You just never see them again.

All of these prove that we have perceptions about food and eating that show up as body size. Sometimes they are easy to change and sometimes they are not. I find that the twice weekly fasting has taught me some things about me that I did not know before. For one thing, I can now skip a meal and not have a cow. In fact, it really is rather simple and very easy to skip a meal, or two, or three in a row, and not die. It does not make me sick. I dont get light headed. I dont feel faint. I dont get tired. In fact, just the opposite happens. I feel lighter on my feet, awake and alert and, dare I say it: happy. I still know where my next meal is coming from. Im not starving. I dont go into starvation mode and my metabolism is not harmed in any way. Studies on fasting prove this is true. (You can read about it in ESE.)

You wont go into starvation mode until about 72 hours of not eating. The body also knows how to maintain your metabolism. If it is not getting food to run on, it uses the storage of fat. A fat belly really is like a pantry for the body to feed itself, but if you keep eating continually, it never gets the opportunity to use up the one year supply of food on your back. This makes it very hard to lose weight and very easy to pack on more pounds. It is not the style of eating that needs to be changed. It is the style of not eating!!

Short, 24-hour fasts for one, two, or even three days in a week gives your body the chance to go into fat burning mode. In between you can eat what you normally eat but in a responsible manner. Brad suggests that you eat more fruit and vegetables, which will replace a lot of processed foods. If you are conscious enough to be eating more fruit and veggies you probably are already not eating as much sugar and starchy foods. Brad says that the key to making this work for you is "self control." You cannot eat like a sumo wrestler and expect to look like a super model. On the days you eat, eat sensibly. Eat enough. And then move on.

So the new thing for me in this is the dessert dish. Now I know what size a dessert should be for a normal sized human being. With the combination of 24 hour fasts, and in between, sensible eating, I should be able to speed up the weight loss thingy. 

Wonder what people will think when I bring my dessert dish with me as a reminder for myself that I can have dessert as long as it fits in my dessert dish? I picture holding it up and saying (more to myself than to anyone else), "As long as it fits in here, I can eat it. If it does not fit in here, then I dont eat it."

I guess Ill find out.

Be back soon,

Marcia