I know for me (and for many people) it’s harder to stay hydrated in the winter. I don’t feel as thirsty. I’m not outside in the sun or getting as warm. Drinking cool or cold water doesn’t sound as refreshing as on a hot summer day.
Plus, the air is often drier due to the season and due to being inside with the heat on – so we might even need a little more hydrate than normal.
If that sounds like you, here are some ways to make winter hydration easier!
Drink decaf or noncaffeinated tea or coffee. The liquids in these hot drinks are still hydrating.
Drink herbal or other types of tea! Lemon, ginger, hibiscus, mint, chamomile, lavender – there are so many to choose from!
Drink hot or warm water – add a little lemon or other flavoring if you feel like the taste of hot water is weird
Regular coffee or tea – there is some thought that the caffeine in these drinks is actually dehydrating due to its diuretic effects, but research shows that in general the overall effect is hydrating, especially if you are drinking in moderate amounts and not more than you are used to. (Read about health benefits of coffee here)
Hot chocolate or other hot milk beverages like chai – these beverages can also provide extra nutrition like calcium, vitamin D, protein, potassium, etc.
Eat more soup! The liquid in soup can still hydrate you even if it’s not a drink! You can also drink broth – just choose one with a lower sodium content if you can.
Make sure you are still eating your fruits and veggies! Fruits and veggies have a high water content and can take care of a good portion of our total fluid needs for the day!
Make time to hydrate. Having a little tea or coffee break can be a nice cozy part of a cold day and can be a welcome break from work or studying.
If it helps, count your fluid intake. Just doing this for a few days might help you realize what times of day you need to add in fluids.
How much water do you actually need to drink? Recommendations vary widely. I’m sure you’ve heard 8 glasses of water per day. I’m sure you’ve also heard 1 gallon of water per day, although I feel like that is more promoted by influencers selling giant water bottles.
The reality is – the amount of water you need to drink varies.
The amount of water you will need to drink is different than someone else and will also probably change day to day
The amount of water you need to drink can depend on:
how old you are
what size you are
what your body composition is
how hot it is
how much salt you eat
how much water you are losing based on your activity level
how much you sweat
how much water you lose through the air, which depends on your climate (both geographically and based on climate control like A/C or heating)
how much water you get from other drinks or food
if you are breastfeeding or pregnant
if you have certain medical conditions
So, how do you tell if you are drinking enough??
The best way to tell if you are hydrated is that your urine is light-colored. If it’s dark, or even very yellow, drink more. This gauge is helpful because it will automatically adjust depending on the above factors.
It’s also important to hydrate consistently throughout the day because we can’t store water. We are not camels. If you drink your whole “recommended amount” of water at the beginning of the day and then nothing during the rest of the day, you will not be well hydrated. (And the color of your urine will reflect this)
Can you drink too much water? Yes, but it is difficult. Our bodies are pretty good about keeping fluid balance correct by getting rid of extra water.
Drinking too much water can be dangerous, but in healthy people without kidney problems this is rare and usually only will happen if you drink extremely large amounts of water in a very short amount of time or if you have lost a LOT of fluid and electrolytes recently – like during a marathon or if someone is rehydrating after severe dehydration.
Most of the time, erring on the side of more water (unless you have a fluid restriction from your doctor) is the way to go. Especially if you are drinking gradually as you go through the day.
The bottom line: drink enough water and other fluids throughout the day so that your urine is light colored, most of the time
Obviously, if you have more specific instructions from your doctor, dietitian, or other health professional, follow those, but if you are just looking for general guidance, that’s the way to go!
I write posts about Nutrition Basics because nutrition terms get thrown around a lot. That can make words like calories, fat, protein, etc. seem familiar. It also means we can say the same words but be thinking of different concepts!
I write posts about Nutrition Basics because it’s important to me that my audience and I are thinking of the same things when I say protein, or carbs, etc.
I also write these posts because I want them in my voice. I want you to hear what I think and believe about carbs, or protein, or sugar, for example, and just to explain in simple terms what those things mean, with a little bit of basic background.
That way when I say, add some healthy carbs, or make sure you have enough calories! you know what that means.
Here are some nutrition basics I’ve written so far:
Like you, your meal plan is unique, and the reasons it fails are also unique. However, here are some common reasons it might not work out and some tips to make it more successful.
1 ) You are trying to make it do too much because you haven’t decided what you really want it to accomplish.
If you’re not sure what is important to you, you may try to do too many things at once and not really succeed at all of them. Read the Lazy Genius’s When Your Meal Plan Has House Hunter’s Syndrome (very quick read) for a great discussion of why this doesn’t work. This is why it is so important to know what you want your meal plan to do for you and why I wrote a whole post about it last week!
How to fix it: Decide the most important things (1-3) you want your meal plan to do for you and don’t worry about the rest
Narrowing down what you really need (e.g. time efficiency, variety, stability, nutrition, cost savings, comfort, ease of preparation) will help you prioritize and eliminate the effort of trying to accomplish what you don’t need (e.g. time efficiency, variety, stability, nutrition, cost savings, comfort, ease of preparation) See how what you need could be the same as what someone doesn’t need?
Sometimes when we plan meals, I think we imagine this separate time and place where we will have a clean kitchen and lots of workspace, plenty of energy, and enough time to leisurely and lovingly prepare new and delicious recipes maybe with some nice music to sing and dance around to.
Ah this GIF is just what I was imagining and – perfect – it’s from the Hallmark channel, known for their realistic depictions of life
Is that just me?
Anyway, we are realists here at Nutrition for Real Humans and I don’t know about you but that only sometimes happens. When it does, it’s great, but most of the time, at least one of the following is true.
It’s after a long day of work and I’m tired
I have very little time between work and another commitment so there’s no time to cook
There are enough dirty dishes from the day that I have to work around them
We don’t have that much counter space
I don’t feel like chopping vegetables
I’m really hungry and would rather just eat now
I don’t feel like eating what I’ve planned
I watch YouTube videos while cooking instead of dancing to nice music
Surely there are other things that make following a meal plan more challenging for you: kids are upset, there’s after dinner activities, an appointment unexpectedly went late, the ingredients you thought you had you don’t or they’ve gone bad . . .etc.
How to fix it: Look at your calendar and really imagine your day while you’re picking the meals to plan
Choose meals that will fit the day.
Don’t plan to try an involved new recipe on the day you have to leave early for choir practice – plan a slow cooker meal, sandwiches, or plan to get something to go
Don’t plan a meal that nobody really likes that much on a stressful day – choose a comforting, easy-to-make meal
Want to try a new involved recipe? Pick a day when you’ll have time and energy to enjoy the process!
Of course this doesn’t help for the unexpected. Another reason your meal plan might fail:
3) Your meal plan isn’t flexible enough
This one’s tricky because for some people, the whole reason they need a meal plan is for stability and predictability. Different people will need different amounts of flex, you might not want very much and that’s ok.
But I think more meal plans would succeed if they included a little flexibility for days when you are unexpectedly busy, or you’re missing a crucial ingredient, or just don’t feel like making what you planned because let’s be honest, it happens.
How to fix it: Plan 1-2 meals that can flex, or can easily be moved around
Flexible meals:
use ingredients you always have on hand (nothing special, they’ll get used even if you don’t use them for this meal) or won’t go bad (frozen stuff is GREAT for this)
are generally easy and quick to make
are generally always acceptable to eat
(This can also be planning to get takeout or go out to a restaurant)
Some of our go-to flexible meals are bean burritos made with canned beans, macaroni and cheese, eggs and toast, frozen fish and oven fries and frozen peas, pasta made with jarred or frozen sauce.
You can use a flexible meal to fill in for a planned meal that doesn’t work out
AND/OR
These meals can be skipped like no big deal because those ingredients will definitely get eaten eventually. This is useful for
unexpected spontaneous dinner plans (hey! meet us for Taco Tuesday!)
unexpectedly abundant leftovers that need to get used up
And if everything goes to plan and you make all your other planned meals, then great, your flex meals give you an easy and appealing meal to look forward to making!
It would be nice if it was just something you could buy, like a neat meal planner, or a cute chalkboard to write your menu on, or even buying a pre-made meal plan from a service or the right meal prep containers. But it’s rarely that easy or one size fits all. That’s why this is key to success – because it’s not trying to make one solution work for everybody. It’s helping YOU know what YOU need.
Now, this isn’t a guaranteed success tool. It’s not like you will automatically succeed just because you know what you want to accomplish.
BUT, if you’re not sure what the point of your meal plan is, how will you know it’s working? How will you make it work?
You need to know what difference you want your meal plan to make so you know when it’s successful.
AND
Knowing how you want your meal plan to serve you will help you decide what it needs to include and what it doesn’t.
Anyway. Enough theory. Let’s talk about some examples – that always helps me.
College Cami
(That’s me)
I did not have a lot of money, but I did have time, and I was willing to eat some weird stuff. I was mainly cooking just for myself and, as I was studying nutrition, trying to follow nutrition guidelines. I also lived in an apartment with 3 roommates and 1 fridge. So what did I want my meal plan to do for me?
Be cheap
Be efficient with ingredients (not use a lot of variety, both for cost savings and for space savings – 4 roommates one fridge, remember?)
Meet certain nutrition goals, like eat fish 2x/wk, have enough calcium, etc.
What did I not need my meal plan to do for me ?
Be quick and easy to make – I had plenty of time to cook
Please anybody else – I could just make what I wanted and/or was willing to eat
Be mentally easy – I had mental space and enthusiasm to try a lot of new recipes, so I could make weird stuff with the ingredients I had because I had time to think about it
Roasted veggie pasta
Practically this meant I ate a lot of beans, cheap vegetables like cabbage, some cheap meats like whole chicken and sardines, and I did a lot of cooking from scratch and a lot of new recipes. (Made my own bread, tortillas, broth, etc.).
This is a smoothie with actual red cabbage in it. I have never had a smoothie with cabbage in it after college, but I liked the color so much that I have 3 or 4 pictures of this smoothie.
Let’s move on to Dietetic Internship Cami
I have almost no pictures from this time and certainly no pictures of what we were eating. But here’s a picture of me with a poster I made for my internship haha.
At this point I had a little more money because I had married a rich engineer – haha, just kidding, we weren’t rich, because dietetic internships DON’T PAY YOU, but we had a little more money. We were also very tired. Both of us were working full time and commuting at least an hour each way (usually more). I didn’t need to pack lunch because one of the perks of dietetic internships despite being unpaid is that they sometimes/often feed you. But my husband did, so some leftovers or lunch ingredients he could pack were helpful. So what did I need my meal plan to do for me then?
Be convenient! We needed meals that required almost ZERO effort when we got home at night. I seriously still don’t know how we made it though that year; when I think back most of what I remember is exhaustion.
Save some sanity. In addition to not having much time, we were both pretty burned out and so didn’t have a lot of motivation or mental energy to cook or plan meals
Still save some money (again, we weren’t really rich, just no longer poor college students)
Be acceptable for both me and my husband – thankfully he’s not picky so this wasn’t a big deal, and provide some leftovers he could take for lunch.
What did I not have to worry about for this meal plan?
Cost (as much)
Efficiency (a little more money to spend on a variety of ingredients, and a whole apartment kitchen to store our stuff!)
I didn’t worry as much about nutrition, mainly because convenience was a priority
We ate a lot of slow cooker meals that I would prep ahead on the weekends, a lot of quick meals like quesadillas or grilled PBJ. We ate a lot of the same meals on repeat because we didn’t have to think of new ones, and we went out to eat more often* (but still not a lot), because we could afford it, and it was sometimes a bright spot after a long day.
*Remember this: Planning to go to a restaurant or planning to get takeout counts as meal planning. Many times the reasons we meal plan (cost, nutrition, dietary restrictions) limit eating out but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a part of a successful meal plan.
Now a family (based on many real life families I’ve worked with)
They are tired of eating the same 5 meals over and over again and they want to spend less money on going out to eat. They get overwhelmed at dinner time so it would be helpful to have a dinner decision made BEFORE the kids get tired and crazy and they get super hungry and they end up just picking up sandwiches or making chicken nuggets again. They’d like to eat healthy, but don’t have any specific nutrition-related health conditions or dietary restrictions. Their meal plan needs to:
reduce decision fatigue by just having the decision made ahead of time
be convenient enough that they will follow their plan and not just go out to eat anyway because what they’ve planned has too many steps
include enough variety to help them and their kids not be bored and/or learn to eat new foods
but also be familiar and appealing enough that they will follow through with the plan
What they don’t need to include:
any particular nutrition goals or dietary restrictions (I always think trying to get all the food groups in is good, but this is not their priority right now)
cost savings on food because they’ve determined going out to eat less will save them money
a lot of new recipes or meals. Too many new things at once is overwhelming even if the actual dish/recipe is easy. They might be adding in 1-2 new things per week. (like a new salad dressing or a new side dish to a favorite main)
Their meal plan would probably include a lot of familiar, easy to make favorites, with small variations each week and maybe as they get in the habit of cooking at home, they start to add in new recipes more frequently. They will probably be most successful if they use convenience products (pre-cut veggies, pre-made sauces, frozen sides or mains) so the effort at dinner time is easy. Shooting for generally balanced meals is good, but if trying to eat lots of vegetables or low salt for example, will make them less likely to eat at home or try new things (their priority), then it does not serve the meal plan and should be set aside to make room for their priority.
My college meal plan would not work for this imaginary family. Probably way too many weird things for their comfort level (molasses on bread for dessert anyone?) and a lot of unnecessary stress about cost savings when paying for some convenience is within their budget and will help them accomplish their goal of being less overwhelmed at dinner time.
You need to decide what success looks and feels like for YOUR meal plan.
Questions? Comments? Tips? Share in the comments. Or talk to me if you need help figuring out what a successful meal plan looks like for you. That’s my specialty. 🙂
But actually, choose one or two. Do not try to do all at once.
I just put the 15 ways in the title because it’s more clickable. This is the world we live in. You can read this blog post, or watch this video about why it’s so important to start small
Figure out one meal you can easily make at home, that you like. Start making it once a week on a day that you have time
If right now you cook and eat at home 1 day per week, try to add 1 additional day
Categorize your days to cut down on decisions – Taco Tuesday or Pizza Friday or Meatless Monday
Make an “emergency meal” list – this is like brainless crowd pleasers, but eaaaaassy (e.g. hot dogs and mac and cheese, PBJ, scrambled eggs and toast, Chicken Caesar salad from a bag), something you can cook at home when you don’t have time or energy. It’s ok if most of your meals are like this. They don’t have to be fancy.
Consider using a snacky meal on a day when you just can’t even
Have a different family member plan or prepare on different days of the week (Age-appropriately of course – your toddler cannot make dinner by themselves). This can be a great way to get kids involved and more excited about food.
Don’t plan to make involved or new recipes on days you know you will be busy! (These are great days for an “emergency meal”. Or for going out, if that fits with your goals)
Pick one new recipe to try per month
Use convenience items if you can afford it and they are available. What parts of cooking at home do you hate? Can buy a product to eliminate that? I hate washing lettuce – I’m much more likely to eat salad if I have pre-washed greens. We eat a ton of frozen veggies. Hate cooking raw meat? Buy it frozen and pre-cooked, or choose meals that don’t involve meat
Don’t mind leftovers? Making a big pot of soup or chili to eat throughout the week works well
Do mind leftovers? Freeze any leftovers for a few weeks from now (this doesn’t work for things like salad obviously)
Don’t get stuck on needing to cook at dinner – maybe cooking lunch or breakfast is a better fit for you
Do half and half – do a takeout entree and homemade salad or veggie. Or reverse – make some baked fish and get some fries from MacDonalds.
This is a Q&A I did with Kaigo to promote a workshop about how to use snacking as a tool for healthy eating.
I’ll also be posting snippets of each question and answer on social media in the next few weeks so follow me on facebook, instagram, or YouTube if you don’t feel like watching the whole video at once.
Some questions asked:
How many snacks should I eat per day if I’m trying to lose weight?
Is snacking on fruit bad because of too much sugar?
Can I eat a snack instead of breakfast?
What snacks are good for kids who refuse to eat fruits and vegetables?
What are good snacks to eat at night if I’m craving sweets?
I’ve always liked the behind the scenes butler-type character (you know, when they’re not the murderer at the end). Alfred from Batman, Jeeves from Jeeves and Wooster, Zhu Li from Legend of Korra. The character in the background who just gets stuff done so the main character can save Gotham, or bumble around society, or execute mad scientist schemes. I want to be that background person for my clients.
My clients are the ones who have to choose their goals and do the work to accomplish them. But I can make it way easier by doing the research, making decisions (collaboratively and respectfully obviously), applying my knowledge and experience, and sometimes by actually doing the cooking or shopping work. That’s my goal – just give you the tools and sometimes the plans, so you can just do it.
Also, those characters are supportive. They aren’t promoting their agenda nor are they critical or judgey of the main person (at least not outwardly). I’m not here to be the food police, make you feel guilty for what you’re eating, or not, or shame you into making changes. I might offer some knowledgeable guidance, or an honest assessment, but you get to choose what to work on and how you want to do that.
Anyway. I’m here to be your Alfred. Are you ready to be Batman?
Are you ready to be Batman? This could be you.
Watch below if you’d rather listen than read 🙂
I talk about how I aim to support my clients by offering guidance, encouragement, and practical help
You may be thinking honesty matters to me because if my clients don’t tell me what they really eat I can’t help them. This can be somewhat true, but this is actually about why it’s important for ME, the dietitian, to be honest with YOU.
One of the ways I respect my clients is by listening to their goals, values, preferences, what they feel their limitations are, etc. (Read or watch more)
Another way I respect them is by being honest. When I share evidence-based information, recommendations, practical tips, experienced opinions and advice honestly (but kindly), that means clients can make the best informed decision for them. (A realistic one you know)
And this goes for the way I run my business too — If I think working together will serve you well, I’ll tell you! If I think what I offer isn’t a great fit for your needs, I’ll tell you that too and hopefully be able to point you to someone or something that will be helpful.
That being said, I really appreciate when clients are honest with me, because that helps me help them, but this post is about my honesty.
Watch below if you’d rather listen than read 🙂
I talk about why honesty matters for Nutrition for Real Humans
