Balanced Eating Through Flexible Routines with Kristin Dovbniak

[Intro] Hello, welcome to my podcast Empowered to Thrive. I'm so glad you joined me today. I'm your host Corinne Powell. I'm an intuitive mentor and I help people pleasers to find happiness embrace courage and experience peace of mind.

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Corinne Powell: I am so glad to have you here with us today. Kristin Dovbniak and I had a conversation together. Chris is the holistic health coach, trained chef and founder behind Healthy Balanced Mama, the podcast and brand designed to help moms stress less about food through balanced eating, simplified meal planning, meal prep and confident cooking.

She encourages and inspires women worldwide to uncomplicate eating and find joy in balanced living. Through her digital courses, cooking classes and top rated podcast. She lives off the coast of New England with her two tiny sweet and spunky sous chefs. 

And thank you for being here Chris. I'm excited to learn how to simplify things in the kitchen and I'm sure many of my listeners are also going to be pumped and benefit from whatever you teach us. 

Kristin Dovbniak: Oh My gosh, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to chat with you. This is one of my favorite topics, so I can't wait to dig in cool.

Corinne Powell: Also before we jump into things around meal planning I noticed that you love coffee. 

Kristin Dovbniak:  I love coffee so much when you say coffee I get really excited like when you shake the food for the dog. I'm like “Coffee? Is there coffee anywhere?” 

Corinne Powell: Yes, well, I'm a coffee lover, too So if you were to walk into a really good coffee shop, what would you order? 

Kristin Dovbniak: Mmm. Oh my gosh, it depends on the coffee shop but my standard order is if they've got good espresso I love a really good Americano and I like it with a splash of heavy cream if I'm feeling something creamy but otherwise, I do like it black. I really love my coffee. So that's that's my go-to.

Corinne Powell: Wow, okay, that's funny because I thought that question and thought to myself, what would I go in and get and no joke literally what you said is what I thought before I got 

Kristin Dovbniak: Oh my gosh, I love it. 

Corinne Powell: It all depends on how the espresso is. I'm not interested in an Americano if the espresso is not good, the espresso makes makes it or breaks it.  I'm the girl who walks up to the counter and says can I sample your roast and they let me but I love black coffee, too. So it matters how it tastes.

Kristin Dovbniak: Yes, it totally does 

Corinne Powell: We would probably enjoy going to a coffee shop together. 

Kristin Dovbniak: Yes, totally.

Corinne Powell: All right. Yeah, so so share with us your knowledge simplifying meals, you know is something that I think many of us are interested in because I know right now I love cooking real food from scratch but honestly, it's it's time-consuming. 

Kristin Dovbniak: Yes. Oh my gosh. I don't even know where to start. There are so many things. So my background is that of a classically trained chef. So I went to school for nutrition and then I followed a boy to another country who is my now husband. So it was worth it but I -  he is Canadian and I needed an excuse to go up to Canada. 

And so I decided to go to culinary school. So in culinary school, they teach you all these incredible wonderful things about how to pair flavors and how to create meals that are really delicious and they don't tell you a single thing about how to do it in a reasonable amount of time because that doesn't really matter when you are developing recipes. 

However, when you actually get into the kitchen when you actually get into working in a professional kitchen. So I've worked in several cooking environments. I worked in a professional kitchen, I worked in a high-end kitchen and then I also worked on a cruise boat And then I also worked at a soup company that produced these amazing vegan soups and I also worked as a professional personal chef. 

So in those three very different situations I learned some really incredible things about how to simplify cooking in my own life and in my own house and there are things that I think that we don't like we're just never taught. So I was never even taught to cook before I went to culinary school I became a vegetarian in high school and my parents were like, that's great we support you, but we're not we don't know what to feed you, just make your own stuff.

So that's how I started teaching myself how to cook and you know I was a high schooler so I would come home from school and sometimes I would go to the health food store and pick things up and just experiment right? But as busy moms as most of us are are just busy people, right? We don't have the time most of the time to experiment in the kitchen for hours. Our kids are screaming I mean, that's who I speak to, I speak to busy moms. 

My kids are like “mom when's dinner”, like “can we have it now” and I'm like, um, give me 10 minutes. Give me 20 minutes, but they want it and they want it now and so something that I learned over the years is a lot of these tips and tools that they use in professional kitchens are things that we can actually bring into our own life.

And so one of those things that I love to talk about is making sure that you are prepping your food in a way that actually is working for you when you're cooking. So one of the things I love to talk about is, you know, I know I know we'll probably dig into meal planning a little bit I love to talk about food prep and finding a way to prep food ahead in a way that works for you. 

A lot of people hear the words meal prep or food prep and they run in the opposite direction because they have this idea in their head that it needs to be like all of these - you see those pictures on Instagram where it's like the bodybuilder style all of these like tiny temporary containers and you cook all your meals ahead of time and it's like chicken and broccoli and really boring and I'm all about real whole food too, but it needs to taste delicious and that doesn't feel delicious. I'm not interested in eating a chicken breast I cooked on Sunday the next Saturday. I'm just not. Also, food safety.

But I do want convenience in the kitchen and so my definition of doing food prep is well first of all, just reminding people that we are always food prepping. We're just oftentimes doing it before we cook the meal. So one of my best tips is figuring out a way to prepare some of the food ahead of time and when I say prepare I don't mean cooking all your meals ahead of time unless that works for you, that does work for some people but the vast majority of women that I work with specifically don't have five hours on a Sunday to cook all of their meals ahead of time.  I don't actually think it has to take five hours.

But in any case they don't want to spend that valuable family time cooking all their meals ahead, but that doesn't mean we can't spend 30, 40 minutes just chopping a bunch of vegetables so that when we when our kids are starving on a Wednesday night, and you know they're not really starving, but they're really really hungry. “Mommy. I want to eat now”. We can throw dinner together in 10 or 20 minutes because those foods are prepped ahead and this again isn't something that I learned in culinary school this is something that I learned working in professional kitchens because if there is one secret I think in professional kitchens to simplifying meals and getting meals on the table it's that, and you know people wonder why when you go to a restaurant your meal is in front of you 10 minutes after you order it sometimes even sooner, and the reason is that those chefs and the cooks in the kitchen, they are spending hours and hours and hours ahead of time doing something called Mise en place which is a French term for everything in its place.

And it was one of the first things we did learn this in culinary school, right? One of the first things we learn is to prep all of your ingredients ahead. So when you go to cook you're actually just throwing ingredients into the pot.

You're throwing them into the pan and it takes next to no time for that meal to actually come together but you have to do the legwork ahead of time and it can feel sort of boring and it can feel sort of mundane to be like “I'm just gonna chop all my vegetables and measure all my spices and all of that ahead of time” but when you realize when you're not running back and forth across your kitchen the entire time you're cooking and you're actually just standing there and putting things together and stirring and you can be present with your food.

It actually comes together in half the time. So this is something that we can do ahead a couple days and we can do some food prep I love to do I have a whole course on meal prep and I talk about three different styles of meal prep. One of them is that batch cooking that I mentioned where you do cook everything or most of the things ahead of time and if you're really really busy that can work for some people. 

One of them is a combination between batch cooking and ingredient prep and the other is ingredient prep and that's exactly what I'm talking about it's just doing mise en place ahead of time. So whether you choose to do the mise en place just before you're gonna go ahead and cook or you're gonna do it a couple days ahead of time either way that is probably my best tip and probably like the best kept secret of professional kitchens to getting meals together quicker. 

And ultimately what I am always getting at and what I find most important is taking the stress out of cooking for our families because like you said I love to feed my family really nourishing nutrient-dense food that feels really good and also tastes really good, both priorities for me. But it can feel really time-consuming and it can feel really stressful and especially when we either are starting a family and we're like, oh man I really want to feed these kids nourishing foods or we're just getting into you - okay maybe I don't feel very good and I want to bring in some more nutrient-dense foods and I want to start feeling better with my cooking it can feel really overwhelming to be like, okay I'm bringing in new ingredients. I'm bringing in new recipes and it doesn't have to feel stressful 

So just some of these little tweaks like the either food prepping or the mise en place or both, sometimes I do both, can make a really big difference. So I think that's probably my best tip for simplifying.

But I don't know if you want to dig into something a little bit further. Let me know. I'm kind of go off on tangents when you ask me about simplifying cooking I can talk for hours. How much time do you have? 

Corinne Powell: No, this is great. Yeah, that's awesome to just be given a really simple tool that we can all put into practice you know? I'm thinking already we often do fresh veggies and in the summer, I think that way sometimes “Oh, let me just cut up extra put them in a ziploc and then they're there”, but getting into that mindset for just all throughout just normal every doing that I can already feel a sense of excitement and the ease of this is definitely going to help me out and I'm sure help anyone who puts it into practice. 

And you also took me back because I was able to work at a camp kitchen as their cook for a number of summers and you know, you're speaking and I'm like oh, I'm back there in my memory thing thinking of the great time. So the kitchen is one of those special places even for me and I know not everybody loves cooking so much and honestly, I used to love cooking more when you have to do it all the time and it can lose some of its, I lost some of my excitement over it because it's it was no longer doing it for pleasure, but doing it because everybody's hungry and I want them to eat good food.

Oh, this is why having ways to simplify it is definitely exactly what I need to hear and I'm sure others so yeah, take it wherever, wherever you want I am just looking to help anyone listening to feel empowered that they can actually eat healthy good foods, nourishing foods real foods, and it doesn't have to be overwhelming so whatever you've got to say, you know into that,  have the floor.

Kristin Dovbniak: Yes. Oh my gosh. Well, I already talked about food prep. Which is actually the third routine that I talk about when I talk about the three routines that I recommend Every family put into practice to make what I call balanced eating easy. And the first one is meal planning the second one is having a grocery shopping routine that works for you and the third one is having a food prep routine like I mentioned that works for you. 

And the reason I brought that up first is because I do think that that's just one of those tips that can be such a game changer when you know when I think about the fact that. 

Tonight, we're actually eating leftovers because we had so much leftover from dinner last night. I'm like, I'm not even cooking tonight. We're just eating leftovers.

But tomorrow I know that I have a busy day of filming, I'm filming a couple videos for a new project that I have coming up. My sister's a photographer, videographer and I know that we're gonna be kind of in the kitchen filming all day and I'm not gonna want to cook anything so I know that I'm gonna want to have dinner for my family and I'm not gonna want to grab takeout because we do love having takeout once a week because mama needs a break, husband doesn't cook so we get to take out once a week.

But I don't want to have takeout on a random Tuesday or a Wednesday I want to have it when it's really intentional and it's gonna be fun and it's gonna be an experience for the family, not and stressful like well, I guess we're gonna order takeout because I'm exhausted and I don't have anything ready to go. I haven't defrosted anything. We have all these excuses right doing that food prep really takes away a lot of those excuses to eating in a way that feels good or getting dinner on the table. And this is by the way, also a huge budget saver. 

I hear from so many people I would love to eat really well, but I just can't it's too expensive and I am like no way. It does not have to be expensive to eat in a way that feels good.

It's about these strategies. Oftentimes when we go to the grocery store and I'll get back to grocery shopping but when we go to the grocery store and we fill our cart up without any plan without any rhyme or reason we bring everything home. We don't do the prep. We don't do the planning and we end up throwing away half of our grocery budget into the trash because we end up with all this food waste and I'm so passionate about going let's get rid of the food waste and let's start using what we have. 

We can save money and we can actually make balanced eating happen. So I'm thinking about myself tomorrow after this filming day or actually I'm thinking about tomorrow morning in the fridge I did a little bit of food prep yesterday and so I just chopped up some onion and I chopped up some pepper and I chopped up some butternut squash and I've got some beef in the fridge. So all I'm gonna do it tomorrow morning is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna take that beef and I'm going to just Saute it up. I could have done this ahead of time, too but I didn't want to do it yesterday because that was what I was feeling I'm all about listening to your intuition and I was like, yeah, I don't feel like cooking beef.

So I'm gonna do it in the morning. It'll take me five minutes I'm gonna throw it in the slow cooker with a can of diced tomatoes with some garlic, with a whole bunch of seasonings the butternut squash, the onions the peppers. I'm gonna put some broth on top and I'm gonna let that cook all day. When my secret ingredient is a little bit of cocoa powder and I'm gonna have a delicious beef and butternut squash chili ready for all of us when I get done with the day and I don't have to think about it. 

All I have to do is open the top stir it season it, I seasoned it ahead of time, but you know, you got a season to taste and serve it up to my family. That is fast food. That is so easy. It was you know, five minutes on the weekend five minutes in the morning and literally no time at night It might be my kids complaining because it's so hot. They're gonna have to wait to take a bite But that's fast food, that is convenience and it's those little things that we do that simplify cooking and really just and make this happen in our lives.

So going back to those three routines though, one of them that I mentioned is doing some meal planning. Now that's another one of those things you say meal plan you see meal prep You say meal planning and every mom is like I don't have the time and I'm like I get it, right but you also don't have the time to stand at the grocery store and stare in the aisles and be like “What are we cooking this week?” I don't know and then grabbing a bunch of stuff again throwing in your cart coming home and then on Tuesday night being like What's for dinner? 

I've got two celery stalks and a chicken breast and a potato. Huh? Like I mean you could throw something together with that, but it's not very satisfying and I'm all about satisfaction because if you are satisfied then you're gonna keep eating that way and that doesn't sound like an appealing meal to me. So doing a little bit of planning ahead of time in a way that is flexible can be a game-changer. If this doesn't have to be rigid. I am like anti rigidity. It doesn't have to be rigid It doesn't have to be something that it's like, okay I have set out every single meal that I'm gonna eat for the next month and I have to follow this plan It's not about following a stricter rigid plan.

It's about going okay, how can I look at the week ahead? How can I look at making cooking easier for me in the week ahead by identifyingwWhen do we have some busier days or busier times of the day? so for instance If your kiddos have zoom meetings three times a week in the evening and you've got to be quiet and you can't be crashing around the kitchen then maybe and the zoom meetings don't end until 6h30 and your kids are gonna be starving by the time that's done. 

Maybe that's a slow cooker or an instant pot night where you do a little prep ahead and then you can go ahead and just throw that in the instant pots done in 20 minutes or you it's in the slow cooker and it's done as soon as they're done with their meeting. I'm just you know it if it's not a zoom meeting if it's the future and we can do things like soccer practice and theater and those things maybe it's that right. 

So it's about looking at okay “How can I create my own convenience and bring more convenience into my week through my meal planning?” I always recommend just planning for five days because it allows two days for flexibility I mentioned that we love to do one night of takeout or a pizza night or a date night or something like that and oftentimes there are times where we're gonna get invited to a friend's house or we're gonna want leftovers or something like that. 

And so by working that flexibility into our routine it makes it feel a lot less rigid going back to that and it makes it feel like okay, ihis is doable. I'm only I can plan five meals. I can plan for five meals this week I don't necessarily plan the meals by the day and everyone to each their own with this Everyone's a little bit different if you have a really busy week.

Sometimes it is helpful. Like I mentioned the instant pot slow cooker nights Those you know when we need that extra support sometimes it can be really helpful to be like, oh, yeah Tuesday's definitely the slow cooker meal and the rest of them. I can kind of mix and match I'm all about, you know listening to your body and your satisfaction and what sounds good to you. 

So if you have five days of meals planned out and you have some flexibility in the evening if you've done a little bit of prep ahead, especially you have the time to get these meals on the table really quick and When you do that, then you can choose whatever meal it is you want to make that night It's like you have that freedom of going. Oh, I've got five choices. What are we gonna make tonight? I've got all the ingredients because we're gonna do we're gonna go grocery shopping and I did a little bit of food prep, everything is that much easier?

 And I don't want any of these things that I share to sound overwhelming either in and of themselves because we're trying to take away that overwhelm if you're new to any of this I always recommend just starting small and just starting with planning.

So starting with planning a few meals a week and going from there pick those busiest days the hardest days It is to get dinner on the table. Start there and I always I talk about dinner I do think that it can be helpful to have a couple options for breakfast and lunch as well but specifically dinner time tends to be the hardest time of the day because everyone's hungry by then everyone's a little hangry. Everyone's tired from the day including mom including dad Like so we're just trying we're just trying to make it work and get dinner on the table So I always recommend just planning for five days and if you are new to planning or maybe you've been planning for a while. 

Something else I recommend is having a family favorites list. So when you sit down to create your meal plan having a list that you just spend maybe 20-30 minutes. Going through and I like to survey my family. So I have a three-year-old and a seven-year-old and my husband's neutral when it comes to food, so he'll eat anything, he doesn't like olives. That's his only thing. He'll just pick them out. 

My three-year-old when I ask her what her favorite food is she either says mac and cheese or dino nuggets and we do not eat either of those often But those are that's what she likes and that will always be her answer. We'll see if it ever changes, hopefully fingers crossed but my seven-year-old has a lot of opinions about food. 

Like she has very specific things that she really likes. She really loves when I make spaghetti squash bolognese She really likes that beef and butternut squash chili. She really likes my slow cooker whole chicken. She really likes my pasta with cashew cream sauce and I'm naming the things that she said to me I like this. I like this. I like this. I like this.

So helpful to get your family involved and to consider the meals that are what my seven-year-old likes to call. “You hit it out of the park mommy” the meals that she really enjoys and that they're actually going to eat and when we can create that list of maybe even maybe it's just five or ten meals At this point I've got a list of 20 meals that I know my family loves and I know that pretty much any time of the they're going to eat and I just kind of divide it up seasonally.

Because we do like to eat seasonally as much as possible, especially when we're buying local vegetables and things like that. So I get them involved and I have this list of meals where I'm like, okay this that's typically what I start with I start with okay: what haven't we eaten in a while or what is in season and what can I put on the meal plan based on those? Based on those meals just to make at least two or three of the meals during the week just easy turnkey 

There's no food fights. It's like I'm I know that they are likely going to eat them I don't sweat it if my kids sometimes don't eat the meals. I know that they eat they'll be fine. But for the most part that simplifies things in and of itself and then I can go I keep a list of recipes to try. 

I have a board on Pinterest, then I can go to Pinterest then if I'm feeling really inspired I can go to my cookbooks. I can go to what I've saved on Instagram from that person I follow and that looked really delicious I can go there second but first I start with the meals that I know my family loves and take some of that pressure off myself to reinvent the wheel every single week. 

So to recap a couple of the things that I recommend are just planning for five days so you can bring in that flexibility. Not having to put the pressure of having the days on the meals so that you can if you want to just mix and match throughout the week. Having that family favorites list and a recipes to try list can be really helpful so that you're not reinventing the wheel Every single week and the last tip I have for both simplifying when it comes to meal planning and then also food prep is to choose recipes with similar ingredients. 

This is something that I see a lot of people not doing and this is also a money-saving trick And it's also something that saves time at the grocery store because you're just buying Two peppers and then when you go to prep you can prep two peppers all at once just one after another It's very easy to prep too.

It doesn't take much longer than just prepping one but you know it does take a lot more time prepping ahead of broccoli and ahead of cauliflower and three zucchinis and four peppers and an onion and like so when you can really just simplify it and use some of that some similar ingredients. 

It's also a great way to eat more seasonally as well Which another money-saving Trick there too is eating seasonally. I like to weave those things in because I know that's a concern for a lot of people.   So it can be really helpful to choose recipes with similar ingredients because it just simplifies things at the store, it simplifies things when you're prepping.

So those are some of my biggest tips when it comes to to meal planning which is one of the three routines I talk about as well: food prep and then having a grocery shopping routine that works for you, too. We're all different in terms of how we grocery shop and what routines work for us but a couple of things that I always recommend are actually when it comes to meal planning based on how often you want a grocery shop. There's no rule to how often you want a grocery or you grocery shop. It's totally up to you. 

I like to grocery shop weekly, I typically do a bigger grocery shop at the beginning of the month where I get a lot of my staple items and I like To go to Trader Joe's because it's 45 minutes away. And so it's like a little like mommy vacation I go to Trader Joe's I get a good coffee It's like my it's my little monthly mommy vacation for two hours to go to Trader Joe's actually, it's probably three hours but I don't worry about it.

And I get a bunch of stuff at the beginning of the month and then I supplement in between with fresh produce and things like that. So I like to go weekly because I do like to get fresh items. But I do not like to spend two hours at the grocery store every single week because I don't have time for that and sometimes I have to bring my kids with me and that's just a whole other hassle. And so reducing again going back to reducing that stress. We're simplifying things. We're taking the stress away.

When we dread going grocery shopping. That's gonna be one more reason we're not gonna go and then we're not gonna have the food in our fridge and it's impossible to eat in a way that's balanced when we don't actually have any food available to us to make a balanced meal So just making sure that you're getting into a routine that works. If you like to shop twice a month then plan for two weeks at a time so and again it can be super flexible. 

But have a rough plan for a couple weeks if you like to to shop weekly have a plan for weekly shopping. And when you write out your grocery list. My absolute best tip for writing out your grocery list and this is something that I learned very quickly when I was a personal chef. So when I was a personal chef, I worked for several families and basically  every day of the week I would have a different family that I would work for and I would go to their house and I would prep for them for like either the entire week or sometimes several weeks at a time and put it in the freezer. And so I would always go grocery shopping for those fresh ingredients right before and so I'd be pulling up to whole foods at like 8 a.m right? 

When they opened and I had my grocery list and I remember like my first couple of jobs I have this big long grocery list because remember I'm cooking all of their meals breakfast lunch dinner snacks sometimes for two weeks at a time. We're talking like $500 grocery bills and I have two grocery carts and like imagine little me. I'm five feet tall I'm like pushing two grocery carts and Whole Foods.

This was I don't even know how I did it but when I had those grocery lists that were just all of my recipes kind of scribbled down on a piece of paper and I went in it took me, you know several hours to do that grocery shop and I wasn't getting paid for the grocery shopping time I wasn't getting paid until I got into their kitchen and started cooking and I knew that they were coming home at 5. So I had to get all the cooking done by the time they got home at 5 and so it was really stressful.

And I know that most people listening are probably not going and doing $500 grocery shops to cook all of their meals ahead of time for the week. But we can actually utilize the same principles that I use as a personal chef, which is grocery writing your grocery list based on store category. So it doesn't matter what grocery store you walk into most of them are laid out very similarly there. Some of them are a little bit different. I've actually noticed that Trader Joe's is different than most of your mainstream grocery stores. 

Most of your mainstream grocery stores and Trader Joe's included you walk in and there's some produce in the front because it's bright. There's so much marketing behind this. It's bright. It's enticing. And so you walk in and it's the produce section first. 

So I like writing out everything I need in the produce section so I get out all my recipes or meal ideas I don't think you actually have to use recipes in order to eat balanced meals, but your meal ideas. 

And so I write down all of the produce items I need over here. And then you start walking through the store and typically you get to the meat section in most stores. So if you need to get any meat there or fish, you get that stuff, right? And then you keep walking through and typically it's like the dairy and the freezer section. Okay. Then I go to the dairy and the freezer section. So I write everything that I need in the produce section, in the meat and fish section, in the dairy and freezer section, and then you get to the middle aisles.

And then anything I need in the middle aisles, I go ahead and I get there too, which I don't get a ton of because I typically get a lot of, I do a lot of online ordering for that stuff because it just saves so much time.

So I just categorize things by grocery store category. And that means that no matter what I go to the grocery store, if I just use that simple method, it's in and out and so quick and so stress-free. And I'm not running back and forth throughout the grocery store because I forgot something. And that's one of those things that I think - All of these things, all of these areas, which feel very easy for me now, I realized they feel easy for me now because I've created these really simplified routines around. 

For a lot of people, they're like, oh my gosh, don't even talk to me about going to the grocery store. I just avoid, I avoid, I avoid because it's so stressful because you've got the kids who, I mean, especially now where I am, we're all wearing masks to the grocery store. It's mandated. So even the kids and the kids were used to having a snack when they're at the grocery store and now that's not possible.

And they're like, why are we here if there aren't snacks? This is not, I'm not okay with this. And so running, having to run back and forth around the store is just an added stress. So let's take the stress away. Let's simplify things. Those are the three routines that I really love meal planning, grocery shopping in a way that actually works for you. Don't listen to what it works for anyone else, unless it sounds like it would work for you, find what works for you.

And then do a little bit of food prep ahead of time, do some of that mise en place so that, so that your meals just come together that much quicker.

Corinne Powell: Love it. Wow. Thank you. That is so much good information. And what stuck out to me was having meals for the week that incorporate the same sort of ingredients so that you can prep an excess of one item and use it multiple times over. I'm going to take that, you know, from what you said, all the good you said, but I'm pulling that out for right now.  I'm always looking for what's what's the one thing I can start incorporating change in once I've got that going strong, then I can incorporate another change. 

But I love that because if anything, I struggle with bringing variety into our meals, but I could easily think about similar meals or incorporating similar ingredients, but then changing up what I'm using for the next week. So there's variety.

So I love that. And all that you shared with us. Wow. That is so good. I'm sure that you are lightening the load for people because that was so clear and so helpful. Thank you.

Kristin Dovbniak: Oh, you're welcome. And there is, by the way, there's so many ways to add in variety with our meals, even using similar ingredients. I know that when I say that sometimes it's like, Oh, I don't want to eat the same things over and over again. But even if I just use the example of sweet potato. So if I'm using sweet potatoes in multiple meals, one of my family's favorite meals is my, it's the longest name ever. It's my sweet potato, Turkey taco pie. So it's basically a layer of like taco seasoned. I use Turkey way back when I made the recipe, we can use any sort of ground meat. And so I, it's like Turkey seasoned with a layer of sweet potatoes and some cheese and some jalapenos. It's really yummy. 

And it's all kind of baked up together. So that's one of their favorite meals. So I use sweet potatoes in that. I love making roasted sweet potato, black bean tacos. That's another meal. 

Okay. We're using some very similar ingredients. Those are both kind of like taco-y seasoned recipes, but let's, let's switch it up completely. I love making a sweet potato, white bean soup. I sometimes add chicken sausage to it. I sometimes just leave it as is. I love adding some kale in there. That's completely different than those other two recipes. What else could I use sweet potatoes for? I love making a chicken pot pie soup as well. 

One of the things I love to prep, during my food prep at the beginning of the week is shredded chicken. And I'll make some shredded chicken in the instant pot and I'll use either thighs or chicken breasts, whatever I've got on hand and shred it up and use that in like, I could use it in 10 different meals, but I use it in a couple of different meals throughout the week. And so if I make my chicken pot pie soup with the sweet potatoes in there, there we go. We have four different meals that are very different. They're none of them are exactly the same. And then if I take that same shredded chicken and I turn it into a barbecue chicken bowl with some roasted sweet potatoes and some homemade slaw and some homemade barbecue sauce on there, that's another completely different meal. And I think I just planned out five meals right there, all using sweet potato, but they're all very different or at least somewhat different. Right? 

So it's very, it's very easy to bring in that variety without it feeling like you're eating the same thing. And the next week, maybe you choose butternut squash instead of sweet potatoes, or, you know, you mix it up in that way. Exactly. Like you said, it can be within the week and then it can be within, you know, within the month as well variety. 

So it's so key, but I think that when we are make ourselves overwhelmed with it, then I think it can even hold us back. So I think there's definitely ways to make it work.

Corinne Powell: Hum, those meals sound so good. And where is it that listeners can find you?

Kristin Dovbniak: So, the place that I hang out the most is over Instagram, I’m @healthymamakris over Instagram, that’s M-A-M-A  K-R-I-S. 

My website is also healthymamakris.com and my podcast is the Healthy Balanced Mama Podcast and like I mentioned, I have several courses including Healthy Mama Meal Prep which is my best-selling course, and then I have several courses on balanced eating. 

I’m actually gonna give your listeners a code, if you guys do want to jump in and start learning some of the tactics for simply meal planning you could use the code change radically and you could get 20% off any of my courses. 

Thats where you can find me, I hope that your listeners will come and connect with me and hopefully I can give some more tips on simplifying all of this. 

Corinne Powell: Thank you, that's so nice of you to offer them a discount and everyone listening should definitely connect with you. I love following you and I love seeing your pictures because you actually make me hungry when I see them.

Kristin Dovbniak: I love it, thats the best compliment that I can get. 

Corinne Powell: Yes well, and your personality. You are such a warm and inviting presence and I just want to acknowledge that even while everyone is still listening because really, truly its not just about what you produces, it’s who you are and I really do feel like people should start following you and take advantage of the courses you offer because its so much more them just getting tools and tips and technics, its connecting with someone who is full of passion over what you do and for the people you work with.  It's so obvious to me, I can feel that from you and from your social account. So thank you for what you are doing, its grat.

Oh my gosh, I appreciate that. I love what I do, so I really appreciate it. 

[Ending] I want to close out today's episode by thanking you for being here with me. I hope what you heard has been helpful. If there is anything that you want to talk about in more depth, I’m on Instagram @corinne_changeradically⁠ or of course you can go directly to my website changeradically.com. 

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