I’ve never been a fan of counting calories. I’ve tried a couple of app:s where you insert your foods and it gives you all details about how many calories you’ve had and how much more you need etc. It’s doable, but I find it taking too much of my time trying to look for right foods from lists and picking the correct amounts.
Last summer I started working with a Beachbody program called 21 Day Fix Extreme. The program comes with five coloured containers, same as in 21 Day Fix. Instead of counting calories, you count containers. There is a method to count the calorie target depending how active your lifestyle is and how much you weight. Once you’ve found your calorie target, you look from a chart how many of each containers you should be eating. The bottom line is, if it fits in the container, you can eat it.
How to use containers?
With the program comes a list of allowed foods. The basic line is that green is for veggies, red is for protein, purple is for fruits,yellow for carbs, blue for fats and orange for seeds and teaspoon for healthy fats. Easy enough? Just fill your container with food and you’re ready to eat! The containers are easy to also to carry along -I often have a blue box of nuts in my purse just in case I get hungry.
At first, it of course took a little while to get used to the containers and remembering what product goes in the which container. But this, like everything, you get used to really fast and now the colours seem really easy to me.
How much to eat?
As I mentioned earlier you need to calculate your calorie target. Depending on your target, you check the chart for right amounts. For me, the target is 1200-1499 kcal, which means 3 green, 2 purple, 4 red, 2 yellow, 1 blue, 1 orange and 2 teaspoons. With these containers, you don't need to eat the exact same amount of calories each day, in fact it's even better if the calorie amount varies a bit (as long as you stay in the limit of the allowed containers. I found that pretty quicly you also get the routine to containers and amounts, so even if you need to change your meal plan for the day, it's pretty easy to fill the right containers.
How to keep track of what your eating?
Of course there also is app:s you can find to help you keep track of how many containers you had at which meal and how many you still have left. Or if you're more of a paper and pen -type, there are tally sheets to be printed out to help you keep track. I used the tally sheets first, but once I got used to the app on my phone, I found it pretty useful. Once you see, that all the containers are used, it's time to close the kitchen for the day :)
How does one day with meals in containers look like?
I've shared with you a couple of my meal plans in past and now it's time to get those meal plans into actual foods :) I usually start my days with a Shakeology smoothie. I always throw in one green container full of spinach (or something else green). For
lunch I had left overs from the day before: ground beef sauce with
brown pasta and a side salad. And for dinner I made some chicken with
brown rice and a side salad. Since the Shakeology is counted as 1 red, I
had 3 portions of protein, 3 of veggies, 1 of purple and 2 of yellow
from my main meal of the day. I also added a teaspoon of olive oil on
both of my side salads filling my healthy fats for the day.
As you can see from the picture below, even though I measure the foods with containers, I like to eat them from a plate. That way you also see how much each container is on a plate and after a while you won't be needing to use the containers all the time.
To fill in the rest of my containers, I had two snacks: Greek yogurt with chia seeds and a little pure vanilla extract (counted as free foods) and then an apple with almonds.
Are you familiar with the 21 Day Fix containers or would you like to know more?
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