Lesson 7: Meal Plans and Charts
This lesson provides meal plans and nutritional charts.
Introduction
Some people prefer to “graze” throughout the day rather than to set aside meal times, but many of us must conform our eating pattern to a work day or family schedule.
Breakfast may be the most difficult meal for people to convert to paleo foods because it is traditionally either high in grain carbohydrates, saturated fats, or both (think breakfast cereal, pancakes, buttered toast, bacon, eggs), and habits can be hard to change. A paleo breakfast is not all that different from any other paleo meal. It may contain lean meat leftover from dinner, or egg, and fresh fruits and vegetables. This meal will give you abundant energy to begin your day, and the advantage of normal blood sugar.
Lunch contains lean meat (perhaps also leftover from dinner), fruits, and vegetables. A convenient lunch may contain homemade meat and vegetable soup, or salad containing meat or egg, a variety of vegetables, and garnished with healthful oil and nuts. See pages 191-193 in The Paleo Diet, for soup recipes, and 185-191 for salad and dressing recipes.
Dinner can be more elaborate as you may have more time to prepare it. As with the other meals, it contains lean meat, fruits, and vegetables. You can take advantage of this time to prepare extra servings for breakfast, lunch, and snacks for the following day.
Snacks between meals contain the same foods you eat otherwise: fresh fruits and vegetables, leftover or dried meats, or nuts. See pages 179 and 180 in The Paleo Diet, for recipes on making your own dried beef and salmon.
See below for meal plans and see pages 140-158 in The Paleo Diet for sample menu plans for all three levels of adherence to the diet, and Chapter 10 for recipes containing a wide variety of foods including snacks and condiments, and paleo food substitutions to use in your own recipes.
