Effortlessly Manage Your Busy Bill Format for Animal Science

Busy bill format for Animal science

hi this is pat iyer with legal nurse podcast and today i have a guest casey olsen who's going to be talking with us about something that affects every one of us every day and that is how we handle our meal preparation in a busy life you've got demands on your time as a business owner as a clinical nurse as a parent as a child perhaps to elderly parents and all of this can impact on the way that you eat i met casey through a networking group that i'm involved with called women's prosperity network and when she shared with me her expertise related to meal preparation and nutrition i thought casey really needs to come on the show and talk with you to give you some tips to make this whole aspect of your daily living much easier casey welcome to the show hi pat thank you so much for having me on this is such an honor tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved in the area of meal preparation and i know you have other aspects of your expertise in addition to that so can you tell us something about how you got there absolutely so i was an athlete my entire life i signed a division one athletic scholarship with boise state did three years there where my time was taken by everything i was training i was going to school trying to have a social life traveling for competitions making sure that i slept and at the time i was also diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder so it was how am i going to take my power back and have something that helped me control this and use it to my benefit in my life and that really became my nutrition and i worked with the nutritionist at the time she became the most amazing person in my life because she taught me so much of what i know and what i aspire to be and so i really got down to learning how to meal prep because you know as a college kid you don't have a lot of money you don't have a lot of time when you're a college athlete and i had to eat good food so that i could feel my body as an athlete and feel my brain as a person and an academic and so that really sparked this meal prep journey so when i finished my bachelor's degree in kinesiology i moved back to phoenix moved in with my fiance and things changed again because i wanted to spend more time doing everything else i wanted to spend more time with my clients i went back to get a master's degree i wanted to spend time with my fiance and my adorable kitten you know all of these things wanted to take my attention but i still have to prioritize myself with food and that's where i built the system that i now have for meal prepping of knowing what's in your kitchen better grocery shopping to lower your grocery bill easier meal prepping to save time and reduce food waste and have really really good food for the week and that's what i teach my clients too is because they have so much pulling on their time that they need to know that that is taken care of know that nutrition is taken care of and they have something that's then going to give them power and give them fuel to handle everything else that they want to do in their life do you notice a difference in your body when you are eating the food that is fresh and highly nutritious versus eating the fast food convenient type of food absolutely it's almost an immediate difference between i i like to talk about water is the biggest thing that makes that impact especially when you're working out you're running around that that first step of water is like life-giving that's the way nutrition is it's supposed to be life-giving it's supposed to fill your body with positive energy and feel your brain you know a lot of women especially nurses that are so busy crazy taking care of their patients they have brain fog because they don't have what's fueling them and when they do have it they notice that brain fog is completely different that it's almost non-existent and if you're working in a clinical environment there is often a variety of unhealthy foods sitting around candy being given to the nurses by grateful families donuts bagels high sugar high salt food that is always present in a break room for example for people who are going in perhaps not being able to get to the cafeteria for a meal but can run into the break room and grab a donut and eat that instead yeah absolutely and i i remember when my grandma was in out of the hospital with dementia and she broke her hip and it was it was a very very hard time for my family and i remember seeing the nurses and how tired they were and running around and some of them would have donuts in their hand and that breaks my heart too because they're taking care of everyone else as a nurse you're taking care of everyone but nobody's taking care of you and i i can't agree more that it's so much easier to run to the break room and grab a donut than it is to have an apple in your bag or maybe you don't even aren't able to get to your bag or there's no no microwave to heat up your meal prep food and so we we have to adjust in those circumstances because there is something that is going to work with your schedule and work with your life let's talk about the meal prep process itself and i think one of the things that i want to ask you is i'm sure you encounter some misconceptions or some myths about meal prep can you explore the kinds of things that you've heard from people when you start talking about meal prep absolutely so the two biggest examples that i can think of right off the top my head are meal prepping is too tedious a lot of people think it takes a lot of ingredients it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of effort a lot of effort in your kitchen of what's being turned on a lot of people like to turn everything on in the kitchen and that's a lot the other one is healthy eating is too expensive and that is such a myth because the number one reason why people say that is because of food waste that that healthy food when they buy it they're really excited they're motivated they want to eat it but then it goes bad really quickly it goes bad faster than the processed food the chips the crackers everything that lasts in our pantry until we eat it so in that in that perspective if we're actually eating the healthy food that we get and using it and utilizing it in meal prep it's easier to then say okay eating healthy is beneficial to my budget it is much easier to handle that way that i'm not having to eat the processed foods or eat out more or do all of those things that make it really expensive for us oh yes it's very expensive to eat out and then the the typical plate that is served in the restaurant is usually enough to feed two people if not three or four meals getting out of that especially my husband and i are primarily vegetarian but we'll eat meat when we go out usually chicken or shrimp i'm always amazed when i look at the size of a piece of chicken that comes in a restaurant and i think the typical serving size is supposed to be the size of a deck of cards if i'm not mistaken and i look at this piece and it's probably got usually two pieces two servings out of one piece and then there's another piece of chicken next to it that's the same size so it's technically four servings on one plate and if you sit there and you eat it all you're a pig you feel like a pig you feel like it certainly yeah and that's where you know i've heard it all my life i've i've heard other people say it but cut your portions in half right away when you sit down and have your meal at a restaurant and that way you know that that's being taken home and you have a complete other meal that's saving money too because we're still going to be full from that half a plate but we're also going to have something to be able to take home or take to work or whatever else you use your leftovers for i've heard people talk about spending time on the weekend doing meal prep for the week can you tell us what that typically would look like yeah so the first thing i do want to mention is meal prep doesn't have to be sunday you know on facebook you see all the the meal prep sundaes and all the beautiful pictures and it doesn't have to be that way you know if wednesday is your day off you take the kids to school and you know you have the house to yourself wednesday is your meal prep day you know it's whatever whatever works best in your schedule whatever works best for your family in terms of the system it's really it comes down to limiting the number of ingredients that you're using while maximizing the amount that you can mix and match so what i mean by that is i made chicken this past weekend for my meal prep i made chicken roasted potatoes a bunch of vegetables some rice and i could mix and match all of that and then you change the seasonings and the spices to make it easier i've made about 10 meals in an hour because i was able to mix and match the chicken the potatoes the rice all the veggies that i made and then let my fiance pick what sauces that he was going to throw on it and that brings him into the process too that he can still choose the taste that he wants the flavor that he wants while having what i already made instead of making something else can you take us through that process a little bit more in depth i'm intrigued by the idea of making 10 meals at one time yeah you've mentioned sauces tell us about the sauces like how would you assemble those ingredients to make things that were different absolutely so one of my one of my biggest rules is to keep it simple and the other rule is to have multiple things going on at once and that sounds like very very contradictory rules but they absolutely make sense in the process what i mean by keep it simple is the recipes i don't work off recipes i don't teach my clients recipes i don't post recipes because recipes to me imply one that i'm a cook and i'm not i'm a meal prepper and two that it has to be complicated that it has to take a ton of ingredients it has to take a ton of time and it has to be you know that restaurant perfect and it doesn't have to be and then when i talk about having multiple things going on at once i'm talking about our appliances in our kitchen if i turn on the oven how much can i put in the oven at once i can put a huge pan of chicken in you know have five or six chicken breasts cooking at once i can have a sheet pan of roasted vegetables and have all of that going on at once i can have another glass pan of you know what potatoes i have roasted potatoes this week and that all goes in the oven it takes about the same time you know maybe a little bit less for the potatoes a little bit more for the chicken depending on you know what you're making if you're roasting or if you're cooking depending how big your chicken breasts are but all of that can be five or six meals right there and it all goes in the oven and you can leave it alone and that's such a beautiful thing to me and then if we have the stove on and we're making rice you know we can put the rice on and leave it and go do something else go chop vegetables another thing when i talk about keeping it simple is using frozen vegetables actually so i the reason why i can limit it to an hour is because i limit the amount of chopping that i do i don't spend a lot of time chopping vegetables because i typically use frozen vegetables and you know we talk about nutritional value there is only slightly less nutritional value in frozen vegetables than there are fresh vegetables and that's because of the flash frozen vegetables that they they hold in the nutrients and they don't go bad as fast there's another misconception of eating healthy is expensive if you're buying frozen vegetables they can be in your freezer for several weeks until you're ready to use it when you are cut the bag open put it on a sheet pan a little bit of olive oil salt pepper i use cayenne because i'm in arizona so we like a little bit of spice to everything and then just put it in the oven leave it alone for 45 minutes you have amazing roasted vegetables it's all about simplicity and knowing how to use your appliances effectively so that you're not you don't have control chaos in the kitchen or real chaos even worse interesting the idea of not following recipes is a radical concept for me i went through a point in my life where i wanted to experiment with new recipes and i didn't cook the same thing two nights in a row or repeat any recipe for about four or five years so for four or five years i was cooking something new every time i was sitting down to make dinner and what i discovered is that i've developed a preference for things that didn't have a lot of ingredients and didn't require me to be standing a lot of the time that i gravitated more to recipes that were simpler and cookbooks that are simpler because my husband has some kidney disease we are very focused on limiting sodium and because he's diabetic we have to limit the carbs we have to limit the sugars so i like recipe books that spell out the nutritional ingredients because not every recipe book does that and i look for things that i can start and then walk away as you're describing from and it's cooking while i'm doing other things absolutely and that makes it much more effective and it makes it more enjoyable you know i that is amazing that you cooked a different recipe every single time you sat down that's incredible because you're trying so many things which i think is something that has changed as well we kind of get into the idea of what our food is we use the terms picky eaters and we limit the amount of food we're willing to try and that's something that meal prepping allows some freedom in as well that we're able to switch out ingredients we're able to try a new combination a new sauce um you know looking at sauces the low sodium sauces are now available and we can really pick and choose those um and the thing is we don't have to be all one thing as well we don't have to be all the the elaborate recipes or you know cooking something different every night we can absolutely do that and we can absolutely be a master meal prepper as well we don't have to be one thing you know some weeks i prep a lot less than other weeks because it's less busy or my fiance needs less meals or i need less meals you know we'll cook a little bit more but some weeks are insanely busy this week we're running around having meetings and i have to go up to glendale right after this interview and you know there's not time so meal prepping gives us time we don't have to be all one thing and i think that's an incredible part too and then i assume you're putting these various meals in containers and you're freezing them for the week so i personally put them all in the fridge i keep my fridge relatively low in temperature so it stays a little bit better if you're going more than i'd say five six days of meal prepping i would recommend putting them in containers and freezing them because they will stay better when you're looking at containers you want to look at the purpose of them so the containers that i always buy whether from amazon or walmart is bpa free microwave and dishwasher safe if you're looking for freezer safe you want to specifically look for ones that are tight ceiling and preferably plastic over glass because of our shattering risk you know you want to look at specifically what you want and then for me personally i have one shelf in my fridge that is only meal prepping the only thing that goes on that shelf is prep meals so i want to make sure that the containers that i have are long deep but also thin so that i can stack them the ones that i have now i can stack three high in my fridge on that one shelf and it's all contained which is the organizational side of my brain that i want everything to be organized and everything to have its place so in the example then that you shared with us earlier of getting 10 meals together with chicken and rice and potatoes and vegetables when you're creating those meals are you taking that combination of four ingredients chicken potatoes rice and vegetables and then dividing them up in different proportions or different types of vegetables to create those meals yeah and it's interesting that you mentioned kind of dividing it up too because there are two different types of prepping there is meal prepping where you're dividing it into individual containers so that you can just grab and take them with you and then there's also bulk prepping so you can make a lot of everything a lot of chicken a lot of rice a lot of potatoes a lot of vegetables and put them in bigger containers so there's only potatoes in one there's only chicken in another and that's called bulk prepping and that's more for people that are at home more families that want to spend time at the dinner table which is amazing they can just pull out all of those bulk containers and everyone can make their own plate and that's amazing especially when you have picky eaters or you have dietary restrictions or you're trying to to make something a little bit easier for someone else in terms of like the sodium and the carbs and you know everyone can make their own plate and get what they want um going back to your question um which i'm i was getting to um yeah that it that it allows you some freedom in prepping that you can make the meals and even if you do bulk prepping you know somebody who needs to take a meal with them can still make their own plate out of those bulk containers and take it with them and so there's a lot of that flexibility of putting things together um in terms of when you are actually meal prepping when you're actually doing the cooking part you know i pick categories and i go off what's already in my kitchen so part of my system is having a kitchen inventory which is everything that's in your kitchen and then asking yourself what can i make out of what's already in my kitchen and that decreases food waste too you know if we already have everything for a meal prep maybe we don't need to go grocery shopping that week and for our budget that's 50 saved you know it's those little things that if you don't know what's actually in your kitchen what's fully in your kitchen you're gonna go buy it again and you're gonna have a big grocery list again because you don't know what's already in your kitchen so when i looked at meal prepping this week i had a lot of bell peppers so from last week i bought a ton of them and i still had some so i wanted to use them up i had rice still i had chicken still we got potatoes because something different changing out an ingredient so it really allows the the flexibility of not using a recipe and kind of saying what do i already have what can i make out of it and then what little things can i adjust and maybe get at the grocery store to make it different and also you're making me think about the times that you've got fresh vegetables in your refrigerator and you may not be able to incorporate them in recipes like for example i'm driving tomorrow to orlando to attend a four-day conference and by the time i come back the peppers and the celery and the cauliflower that's in the refrigerator is not going to be at its peak of freshness anymore because of my husband's sodium restrictions i've been reading labels very carefully and discovering that in broth which is a wonderful foundation for the crock pot much of the broth that's on the shelves is high in sodium even the ones that are labeled lower sodium may have more sodium in them than another brand whether it's chicken or vegetable so i've been chopping up vegetables adding several cups of water and a couple of bay leaves and letting those vegetables simmer in the crock pot for five or six hours to make my own broth which has no sodium and no chemicals and no preservatives and by the way tastes a whole lot better than the machine-made broths i love that yeah so now you're inspiring me i think i need to be cutting up and freezing before i leave the house tomorrow yes absolutely i was even talking to another coach the other day and we were talking about food waste and how we can prevent it even more and she actually talked about in her freezer she has a big container that all of the miscellaneous vegetable scraps that aren't eaten might go bad she throws in there and it has all different seasonings from different foods and she makes a vegetable soup out of that and i thought that was the most that was the most genius thing of something so simple to limit our food waste and with the homemade broth that i'm talking to you about the one step further that i took was that once i finished cooking the broth i had all these pieces of vegetables floating in the water i strained out the broth and then i put the vegetables with some of the broth into a blender and made that as a pureed soup that we had for dinner delicious that sounds so good right now absolutely and that's that's an amazing thing about our food right now too is we are getting more focus on food labels and we are getting more focus on eating foods that don't have food labels when we eat food that doesn't have food labels and i'm talking about vegetables i'm talking about fruits you know to a certain extent our poultry and our meat to a certain extent it's it's getting blurred there but when we eat foods that don't have food labels we are overall more healthy and i think the the realization that we get casey is that if you've been eating fast food and chemical laden food for many years and you switch over to a fresher taste it takes a while but but you can feel differences in your body if you're if you're used to a low-fat diet and then you go out and eat a big piece of pizza which i grew up in new jersey we've got a lot of wonderful pizza places in new jersey that produce pizza that's laden with oil you have to learn how to blot your pizza with a napkin before you eat it and fold it up by the end into a triangle because it's going to drip oil on your clothing and then you eat it and then an hour later your stomach is going what did you just do to me yeah absolutely don't get that reaction from eating a bell pepper for sure no and i've actually talked to a lot of coaches that switched to the plant-based diet is a huge thing right now and there there's a lot of merit behind it and they actually talk about there's no hangover in it so some of these diets that are out paleo keto they come with you know things called the keto flu and different you know adaptation periods but the research is showing that there is no hangover in the plant-based diets putting over the plant-based diet because it truly is filling your body and i i say that as a guilt-free coach that i i really work with ladies who want to be guilt-free with their food and that's a huge thing it doesn't mean that you can't have that deliciously greasy slice of pizza or you know the three tacos that you really want on taco tuesday talking about here in arizona we're all about the mexican food but it it doesn't mean that we can't eat those things it means that we eat those things in terms of our goals if eating that slice of pizza and enjoying it and loving it is a part of our goals today absolutely do it and love the grease you know maybe we don't feel as good but that reminds us too of our goals of how we want to feel of the sleep that we want to have of the energy that we want to give to our families you know eating those things they may taste good we may enjoy it but they're also going to give us a reminder of what our goals are and speaking of pizza something else that is a different aspect of this is the fact that a lot of people have food allergies and can't tolerate some of the food that we are serving this is a slight sideway comment i met a woman at the national speakers association winner conference this weekend who has a background as a meeting planner and she points out that as we think about diversity if you have a staff meeting and you serve pepperoni pizza to everybody who's sitting there captive for lunch you eliminate the gluten-free people you illuminate the vegetarians you eliminate the muslims who don't want to eat pepperoni probably eliminate one or two other people in that group and we're not respecting the fact that if we had given them another choice that would include everybody's tastes and needs we would be far more respectful absolutely people's individual needs absolutely and we we don't have dairy in our house because my fiance is lactose intolerant so we have no dairy in this house and every time that we think of cooking a recipe and it maybe has milk or heavy cream i always think of there has been no better time in history to have a food allergy because we have so many alternatives in our food i can go to sprouts and get dairy free cream cheese like that is an incredible thing so i can still make the buffalo chicken dip that he wants with making it dairy free and i think that is incredible when we talk about celiac there are so many options for gluten-free now i mean we have almond flour cashew flour we have all these different varieties of food that there is no better time in history to have a food allergy you're right you know in the past the idea that somebody couldn't have a wheat-based product would mean that they would have no choice but now there's all kinds of gluten-free options sitting on the shelves and for people who are vegan who don't want to eat animal products there's lots of choices absolutely and it's incredible that you don't have to sacrifice food that you want and you don't have to sacrifice flavor because of it which is what it's all about isn't it to be able to eat tasty healthy food that is easy to prepare and listening to you can be prepared ahead of time so they're not rushing around 10 minutes before it's time to sit down for dinner saying what are we gonna have for dinner tonight or the opposite saying let's not cook tonight we'll just go out to eat it saves us that um or in our case what i typically do is cook more than my husband and i can consume at a meal and then open up those containers and label them with what it is the date the number of servings and off it goes into the freezer absolutely and that's a phenomenal way to do it you know a lot of people start their meal prep journey with leftovers that they make more than they can eat for that night and those leftovers become their prep meals and it kind of evolves from there and i think that's beautiful as well you've shared a lot with us in this last 30 minutes and i appreciate so much the inspiration that you've given our listeners can you tell them how they can find out more about you and the services that you offer absolutely so everything is casey fitness that's k a c double e casey fitness facebook instagram our website is caseyfitness.com you can find all the meal prep guide is in there it's a free guide that i give with my top tips my templates it comes with a recipe that i use and don't use to build your own meal prepping bowl from there you can also see the becoming a meal prep master book is out now as well as any fitness instruction i have on the website perfect well thank you casey so much for being part of the show thank you so much it's been a pleasure i know that you've inspired our listeners you've certainly inspired me i think i'm going to be looking for those did you call it bp free epa free yes yeah so most containers are bpa free it just means that if they're not bpa free the plastic may not melt but kind of seep in the chemicals into your food so the bpa free protects that that certainly sounds like something that's worthwhile most containers are bpa free nowadays but it's always good to look at that check mark all right i'm going to be looking into that aspect i think you've inspired me also to think of creative ways of making more meals chopping up more fresh vegetables and freezing them at the times that you know that you're not going to be able to use them or they're going to reach their end life pretty quickly and also taking advantage of the quality of frozen vegetables which are flash frozen and at their peak at the time that you are getting them at the store so your nutritional value is far better and then if you have to use canned vegetables which we didn't talk about in this show but canned tomatoes and canned beans are options but please no canned peas no canned corn my sister and i were tortured by my mother growing up with canned peas to the point that we had to beg her please don't make us eat anymore and she finally listened to us but i remember that as one of my childhood traumas those things are just not good my mine was canned green beans my mom now makes fresh green beans and they're amazing but a lot of canned green beans as a kid yes yes i had my share of those as well well thank you so much casey and thank you to you the listener who's been coming along on this journey i hope it's been inspiring for you i know that you could be in any one of 77 countries in the world who are listening to this podcast and your food prep and concepts and menus can be dramatically different but i think the principles are the same whether you're making food in mexico or india or australia or canada or england or germany or many of the other countries around the world who are listening to the show keep the principles in mind and i hope that this has been useful for you be sure to come back next week we'll have a new interview with a new guest and we appreciate you being a listener for legal nurse podcast you