58: Busy Mom's Guide to Fast, Healthy Meals

Do you dread making dinner? Can't come up with healthy options that your family will eat, too? Stuck eating more than your fair share of takeout?

With all of the recommendations out there for midlife moms (more fiber! more protein! eat healthy, and get more sleep!), its not surprising that you're overwhelmed with info.

And yet you still don't know where to start!

In this episode you'll discover how the Supper Club has been an instrumental resource for so many busy moms in perimenopause. I recently gave this monthly membership a "glow up" and in this episode, you'll hear all the ways it can help you simplify your mealtime, reclaim your energy, and get your family on board with healthy eating (whether the Supper Club is right for you, or not!)


Here's what you’ll learn:

📌 The Component Cooking method: My signature technique that eliminates weekend meal prep, allowing you to cook dinner just three nights a week.
📌 The Oh Sh*t Meal Planner: How to use this resource to easily create 10-minute meals that help you avoid unhealthy takeout, even on your busiest nights.
📌 Meals for everyone: Simple modifications you can make so you can eat anti-inflammatory meals, and your family can enjoy the same delicious food without feeling deprived.
📌 The link between mindset and meal variety: Why your brain constantly craves new recipes and how to enjoy consistent meals without getting bored.
📌 Easy anti-inflammatory breakfast, lunch, and snack ideas: What to eat beyond eggs and oatmeal to combat cravings and fuel your body consistently all day.

Eating healthy as a busy, midlife mom is easier than you think...and I've got all of your solutions right here!

More Support For You

🍳 Join the Supper Club: How I Cook Just 3 Nights/Week
🙋‍♀️ Work with Me
🧠 Mindset Framework to Stop Relying On Motivation
📌 Connect on Instagram

Transcript

I want you to raise your hand if you dread making dinner.

Because in reality, you always seem to be super tight on time. You're either working late or you have your kids, you know, the sports and after school activities. And then when you have to think about trying to get something healthy on the table, I mean, forget about it. Your family doesn't even want to do healthy food. But you have been trying to eat healthier. And it's really hard to be consistent with that when your family is not on board. And basically you've given up. You

Try to pick up some healthy takeout, but it's not helping you to feel better. I get it. I get your feelings of frustration and giving up because you just don't know what to do.

When I was a single mom to my son, Jack, who is now 24, I started coming up with some really creative meal strategies. I was working 60 hours a week and I was commuting at least two hours a day. And back in that time, I was really struggling with health issues and I, there was just no doubt. I had to eat certain things. Like I really had to focus in on an anti-inflammatory diet. But Jack, I mean, he was a growing

boy at that time, he was super active in lacrosse and snowboarding and skateboarding. Like he was so busy. And the truth was my zucchini noodles and my kale salads, they just weren't going to cut it for what he needed.

So fast forward many years and I now know that an anti-inflammatory diet is the only diet that midlife women should be following. This way of eating, it really helps you to combat the effects of perimenopause because when you lose estrogen in perimenopause, your inflammation increases. But I also know that it's really possible to eat healthy and feed your family at the same time.

Now it takes thinking a new way and this I can show you how to do.

Too many women are trying to improve their health in midlife, but I see you, you're getting lost in all of those recipes on Pinterest. find meal prep hacks that maybe work or maybe don't. There's protein guidelines for midlife. You're supposed to hit certain fiber goals. At the end of the day, the result is that you feel paralyzed with the amount of information that is out there.

Really, you just end up doing nothing. And unfortunately, this leaves you feeling sluggish and exhausted, struggling with cravings and probably not at your goal weight.

It's because of all of this that I created the Supper Club, which is my monthly membership for midlife moms. And I recently gave the Supper Club a really great glow up. And so I wanted to share just how instrumental the club can be for you when it comes to eating for your best self. Plus, if you're listening to this in real time, building the habit of eating healthy now, like in October, is going to pay off in the long run.

Research shows that people who start a new healthy habit in October or November have a 67 % higher success rate than those who start in January. Can you believe that? Like you do not need to wait until January to start eating healthy. You should do it now.

The Supper Club is truly designed to support midlife moms who want to eat healthy and feed their families. It is for moms who work full time. It's for moms who are shuttling kids to sports and afterschool activities and are busy in the car in the afternoons and evenings. It's for moms who are starting to feel that physical and mental challenge that's coming with perimenopause, but they don't know what to do about it.

And it's for moms like you who definitely don't want to spend their weekends batch cooking or finding room in the freezer and then cleaning up a huge mess of dishes.

When I work with moms in midlife, I hear the same frustration when it comes to food and eating and feeding their families. So what I want to do today is just knock down those frustrations. And I want to give you some solutions that are part of the Supper Club that are designed just for you.

And don't worry, even if you aren't interested in the Supper Club, you're going to get a lot of information and a lot of tips that you can use to support easier, healthier family dinner times.

One of the most common frustrations I hear is I don't have time to cook healthy meals or I don't have time for cooking at all. So as a result, you often resort to take out. So with all of your demands on your life, it is no wonder that you don't have time to cook. Remember, I used to work 60 hours a week and commute two hours a day.

And because I was a single mom, I still had to come home and do something about dinner. And because I was battling those health situations, I needed to cook my own dinner. Takeout was a little bit harder. So this is exactly when I came up with a method called component cooking. This method helps you to cook dinner just three nights a week.

Can you imagine? That is life-changing. So here's how it works. At dinnertime, you prepare a recipe that has components. So we're not doing any one-dish meals here. We're gonna do components. So a dinner like tacos or Greek chicken bowls, maybe grilled chicken and veggies. And what you do is you save half of what you make and you're gonna repurpose those components into other meals the rest of the week. In the supper club, all of my recipes are written

with this component cooking method.

So the thinking and the planning ahead, that's already done for you. Also, if you are a mom that picks up takeout more than you would like, I've got a solution for you. I want you to stack your pantry and your freezer with ingredients for 10 minute meals. This is gonna be things like canned tuna, ⁓ some type of noodle, frozen salmon burgers, frozen veggies, tortilla chips, and maybe some jarred sauces.

These won't necessarily be the best meals that you've ever made, but you can easily throw something together in 10 minutes or less. And that's what we're looking for. Something that's quick and easy stops you from doing takeout, but still gives you a healthy option. What's cool in the supper club, I have something called the Oh Sh*t meal planner. And this is for those nights where you're running late and you're like, ⁓ shoot, I forgot to defrost something. But

It means that you can also avoid doing that unhealthy takeout. So this meal planner has instructions, shopping lists, and recipes for 10 different meals that can be made in 10 minutes or less. So if you don't want to figure that out on your own, there's a resource for you in the Supper Club that has everything already figured out for you.

The second frustration I hear is that I want to eat healthy, but the rest of my family does not. Or maybe it sounds like this for you. I'm tired of giving into what my family wants to eat, but I'm also really tired of feeling tired and run down. So as I mentioned, anti-inflammatory is going to be the best way for midlife women to eat. That means that you're removing gluten, dairy,

refined sugars, alcohol, and possibly corn. And I get it. This might be hard for you, but for a lot of families, it's almost impossible to figure out how to cook for your family when you're taking out all of those ingredients.

If you're using that component cooking style method, the one that I talked about, it's really easy to make modifications. So the recipes in the Supper Club all include an anti-inflammatory version

and a family-friendly version. So for example, this month in the Supper Club, pizza meatballs is one of the recipes and it is so good. Honestly, this is one of the like fan favorites. So the meatballs are made with anti-inflammatory ingredients. So what you can do is you can put your meatballs on top of a bed of

rice or zucchini noodles, or maybe you're putting it on a bed of brown rice, and then you're topping it with that marinara sauce. But for your family, the meatballs can go on whole wheat noodles or whatever noodles they prefer. You can use the sauce and then you can put sprinkles of cheese on top. So you see everyone's getting pizza meatballs. It's an amazing, delicious dish. Trust me, everyone who gets this loves it.

but it's still one meal. You're just making a small modification for you and a small modification for your family. So it's harder to use that excuse of I don't wanna eat what my family wants, but I'm tired of feeling tired and run down.

So having a recipe that has that anti-inflammatory version and that family-friendly version, that is going to be a game changer for you.

The third frustration I hear is I despise weekend meal prep. All those dishes, finding storage room in the freezer and not to mention like how many containers do you need? And then there's no time for all of that. Like an eight hour meal prep marathon on the weekend? No way. This was totally me. As a single mom, I was busy with lacrosse games and snowboarding on the weekends and then

there were regular chores, right? Like laundry and cleaning and homework. And I really wanted to get in a little bit of relaxing time on the weekend. So there was absolutely zero time to meal prep. This is where component cooking again came in handy for me because it eliminates the need for any meal prep. Inside the supper club, you get a full tutorial on how to use component cooking. And like I mentioned,

all of the recipes in the Supper Club are always written with this method.

So there is absolutely no weekend meal prep. What you do is you batch cook throughout the week, which ultimately leaves you only cooking dinner three nights a week. So like we had said, know, if Monday, maybe you make tacos, that half of the taco meat is going to be used later in the week for a completely different recipe. So you cook three nights a week and the rest of the week, it's just putting those components together in different recipes.

genius, right?

Another frustration I hear is I want a variety of meals. My family likes to a lot of different things, but here's what happens. You end up getting lost in new recipes, weird ingredients, things take longer to cook than you thought. And in reality, you get burned out. You get burned out with trying to figure out all of this newness, all of the variety, and you resort to takeout or to cooking meals that just don't fuel you.

This right here is a mindset issue. Your brain thinks that you need variety because eating the same thing feels kind of boring, right? Your brain sees that as something that's painful.

And because your brain is doing its job, it wants to avoid anything that feels painful or boring. So when you fuel your body with anti-inflammatory foods, it can really help to focus on everything around you, not including the food as your source of joy. Yes, food should be enjoyable. I always say if it doesn't taste good, you're doing it wrong. So I think food should be delicious, but it should not be the thing.

that makes you happy. I see too many people defaulting to food as their joy instead of the people that they're eating with or spending the time cooking together. It shouldn't necessarily just be about eating the food.

The Supper Club, those recipes give you the best of both worlds. So each month you're getting seasonal recipes plus an access to a bank of other meal plans that you can use as desired. So the goal is to really cook with the seasonal recipes and then add in recipes from the other meal plans to create a little bit of variety.

But here's the trick, I also encourage you to stick with just one or two meal plans every other month and do those on repeat for the month, whether you're using Supper Club or not.

Keeping your meals consistent helps to make your cook time easier. So you're gonna get faster each time you make a new recipe. And remember, the goal is to fuel your body with nutrient dense foods. And you need recipes that are gonna do that. So once you get really good at cooking healthy meals consistently, then you can add in a little bit more variety. But I want you to start simple to begin with.

and get the hang of nourishing your body with really nutrient dense meals.

All right, lastly, one of the frustrations that often comes up is, know, I can find these healthy recipes for dinner and I guess my family and I were doing okay, but I cannot figure out breakfast or lunch. What in the world do I do for snacks when I'm trying to eat an anti-inflammatory diet?

It can be really easy to get stuck with the same foods for breakfast and lunch, like eggs and oatmeal. And when it comes to snacks, I see you, you often fall off to those processed foods, which you don't mean to, but you don't know what else to eat. like packaged snacks that are parading, healthy foods, maybe like protein bars. Eating anti-inflammatory means that you need to fuel your body consistently all day.

every single time you eat. And this could not be more important than starting your day, like your first meal of the day with anti-inflammatory nutrient-dense ingredients. So inside the Supper Club, you get recipes for all of this. You have a dedicated guide for breakfast and a dedicated guide for lunch.

The breakfast is designed to help you regulate your blood sugar first thing in the morning. And then the lunch recipes are there to help you stay full until dinner time and to combat any of those mid-afternoon cravings. Plus you also get these seasonal bonus guides every month. These are my favorite. So you get one for healthy treats for the holidays so that you don't feel deprived and missing out on what everyone else is eating.

There are guides to support healthy eating while you're traveling. You get a grocery shopping guide for anti-inflammatory favorites at the grocery store. So things that you can just pick up and buy. Right now there are more than 12 guides to help you eat delicious food that is also healthy and nourishing.

You know, they say that necessity is the mother of invention. So can we just take a deep breath and recognize how the supper club literally takes care of all of the frustrations you have when it comes to eating meals for you and your family. And whether the supper club is the right fit for you or not, you can definitely walk away from this episode with some really actionable solutions.

for completely simplifying your meal time. Batch cook as you go during the week instead of doing weekend meal prep. Steer clear of those one dish meals so that you have more flexibility for different needs and preferences within your family. Always stick with seasonal recipes to keep things interesting and to change up your variety and round out your day with healthy anti-inflammatory foods for breakfast, lunch, and snacks.

Now, if this sounds good to you, but you really don't want to go through and do all of this on your own, you're in luck because I have done it for you. So literally everything that I just talked about in this episode is included in the Supper Club, All of the guesswork, the planning, the list making, it has all been done for you. And remember, getting started now,

is going to help you build this healthy habit, this healthy eating habit before the year is even over. So if you are as excited about the Supper Club as I am, I want you to head to the link in the show notes or check out the Supper Club on my website at ashleymalik.com

Eating these healthy meals is going to support you in every area of your life, especially as you move through perimenopause and beyond. But I promise you do not have to start from scratch to figure it all out. So go check out the Supper Club. It's going to simplify meals for you and your family.

instantly. Thanks for joining me this week. cannot wait to see you back here next week on the Family Fork