Day 21: Set Up A Weight-Loss-Friendly Recipe System | 30-Day Weight Loss-athon
Welcome to Day 21 of the 30-Day Weight Loss-athon.
All tasks in the 30-Day Weight Loss-athon are adapted from my 52 Weight Loss Missions program.
Read the steps first, then take 10 minutes to complete them.
Move fast, act quickly and stop over-thinking. Ready?
What You Need:
- A binder – large if you cook often or enjoy a lot of variety; small if you plan to have a limited library
- Divider tabs – at least three
- A three-hole punch for hole-punching your recipes OR pre-hole-punched plastic envelopes if you want to keep your recipe pages clean
- The weight-loss-friendly recipes, take-out choices and restaurant menus you collated on Day 20: Find Weight-Loss-Friendly Meals.
Step 1
If several people in your family or household do the cooking or meal organizing, you might want to include them in this process.
First, assemble all the weight-loss-friendly recipes, take-out choices and restaurant menus you collated on Day 20: Find Weight-Loss-Friendly Meals.
If you have recipe books containing only a few recipes that you want, then consider ripping these out or photocopying them, and donating or discarding the books.
Step 2
Next put your dividers and recipes into the binder.
Use the dividers to categorize recipes by family member, healthiness, difficulty, time needed, or any other way you like to sort your recipes.
What’s great about this system is that it makes it easy for anyone to use it. If different people cook on different nights, you don’t have to worry that your diet actions will suffer. Simply ask everyone to use the binder.
And you can easily update the binder any time you find a new recipe.
Bonus Step For 52 Weight Loss Missions Members
Review Mission 19: Create A Smart Recipe System. Complete the additional steps to create a recipe system incorporating New, Untried and Favorite categories.
What If You Don’t Cook?
I don’t cook but I’ve had to do the work and investigate other options for eating smart. I’ve put together a combination of choices for eating out, take-out, home delivery and occasional frozen meals that works for me. You can do the same, too! 🙂
Check in!
And you’re done!
Be sure to leave your comment below to check in and stay accountable. If you’re reading this by email or in a reader then please click here to leave your comment.
See you tomorrow!
I like the idea of photocopying the recipes that I like and then giving the books away is a good idea as I only have a few recipes I like and I have them in different books which will be good for me in de-cluttering my recipe books.
This is a great idea. Just came home a scrap retreat where I made graduation announcements for my niece. I am a limp noodle today. I brought someof my own food and did not OVER indulge. 🙂
I don’t have an extra binder & dividers at home, but I’ll keep the idea in mind. I use weightwatchers.com for recipes sometimes, and other online sites. I could be better at keeping them in a binder or somthing, for quicker lookup. RIght now they’re in a drawer. 🙂
Struggling with this one. I do get disappointed with recipes sometimes because they often appear better then they are so I tend to cook the same old things. I will look through the books and recipes I have and put them all together.
It’s been awhile since I’ve checked in due to certain things but I’ve been slowly incorporating the steps into my everyday life, once I read them. This one will take some time as like others, I have all my recipes scattered in different places. I had planned to get organized and didn’t know where to start so this helps me figure that out. Again it will be slow just due to work hours but at least things are being accomplished!
such a great idea. just wanted to say I love all your helpful hits not just in the weightloss. you are a much more organised woman after my own heart.
Like someone else said, this would be far more than a 10 min. task for me. I did at least look at my cookbooks (which I tend to collect more than actually use) and was reminded that I have several theoretically good ones: Mr. Food A Little Lighter, Richard Simmons Farewell to Fat, and even an old Weight Watchers cookbook (given to me as a gift, wihich hurt my feelings at the time) although I have never been in WW, which is probably obvious to all! 🙁
This is a great system. I’ve already started using a binder to keep the recipes I have, so now I’ll just add a section for the healthy ones. Think I’ll clean out the ones I already had that I don’t plan on trying.
Oh My Seems I misread the intent/objective of yesterday’s mission. I thought the point was to make healthier dinner choices for ourselves, while at the same time making dinner simplier to make for the entire family. Oh Michele Connolly, this is more than a ten minute task – but I signed on so I’m in for the whole 30 days of tasks. I did get a recipe organizing binder for Christmas with dividers, so this is a good opportunity. I will fish through my recipes and organize/rewrite a few a day into the binder so I can ditch some of the books. Although, some will remain to “goodie” recipes for the holidays and such…but I will make the healthy ones accordingly with a colored dot, so anyone looking through knows the healthy choices.
I use a 3×5 card box with dividers for favorites.
will get on to yesterdays and todays task tomorrow, been far too busy today but great ideas.
Got so ‘bogged down’ in the recipe books and magazines, that I’m going to start by making my usual meals less fattening & more healthy and then maybe start a file with those 🙂
Done. For anyone who is interested there is a great recipe book called the Bikini Cookbook which all its recipes are 300 cal or lower. You can check it out here http://www.thebikinicookbook.com, $19-95. Great low fat recipes.
I cook most nights and it’s healthy. Need to. It out the starches. Beware that take out, restaurant, frozen food may be low fat, low calories, but still much higher sodium than you would use at home.
I have a decent recipe system. I recently did a huge recipe purge when I found out I was gluten intolerant. What recipes we have I love & use regularly. My husband has been helping me tweak them to make them healthier.
My husband and I share the cooking responsibilities and we already have a shared cookbook on our iPads where we can add any new recipes at any time. We also plan all,our menus together so we’ll continue doing that and just make sure we used the healthiest of our recipes and I downloaded some more yesterday that we’d like to try.
I used a computer program rather than a binder & added a new cookbook, EAT RIGHT. I can copy the recipes I already have typed in & this will be my “go to” cookbook.
Great idea! My favorite weight-loss friendly recipes are scattered in several places, so I’ll happily use this system to get organized :->
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