One Hour of Meal Prep = A Nutritious Week #foodismedicine #antiinflammatory

Welcome to my kitchen. I'm gonna walk through three anti inflammatory meal prep staples that I'll make on like a Sunday afternoon. It takes less than one hour, but I swear it's so key for setting yourself up for success. We're gonna start with the salmon salad. This is gonna come from canned salmon and it is amazing for the anti inflammatory benefits, but also is a great source of protein and I like to have protein staples on hand. The second one that we're gonna get into is the chia seed pudding. It's a super simple chia seed. Then we're gonna get into just a big random salad. I love prepping a big random salad at the beginning of the week so that you just have those vegetables on hand. The most common question that I'm asked is how long does this last in your refrigerator? And I'd say about five days, especially if you're not putting dressing on the salad. Okay, so I have three cans of salmon here. So this isn't actually the brand that I usually buy, but I didn't realize that I had forgotten to get canned salmon before we started filming. So my amazing husband just ran out to get some. Usually I'll use Wild Planet or also Costco, but the most important thing is that it's wild canned salmon. And actually all canned salmon is wild. We're just gonna throw the actual salmon into the bowl. All three cans. There we go. I'm gonna then put on some avocado oil, mayonnaise. Do you want your mayonnaise to be based in avocado oil or extra virgin olive oil? Because those are some of the healthiest monounsaturated fats that you can get. I have six stalks of celery here and six pickles. I typically do two celery and two pickles per can of salmon. So if you're just making one can, you can use that as your base. So I'm just gonna chop the celery. So I try to cut em up as small as possible for that crunch. So I'm gonna throw the celery in the bowl. You could also do just one thing of celery and one pickle. If you don't love as much crunch. I just like love the crunch. I try to just pack in as many vegetables into every recipe as I possibly can. Okay, then we're gonna chop the pickles. So ideally you wanna try to find pickles that don't come with vinegar. This brand specifically that I bought is just Costco pickles and it comes with vinegar when they're in vinegar, they're not gonna be like fermented. Pickles can be a fermented food if they're in actual probiotics and not in vinegar. So you can look for. There's a few brands that are on the market that you could look for if you're trying to also get a little extra boost for your gut health. So I have. They try to add them to a lot of dishes, not only because they add so much flavor, but also because they are an allium vegetable. They're in the allium family, like with leeks and garlic. And they have sulfur containing compounds that are really helpful for not only gut health, but also supporting your natural detoxification system. I'll include a recipe in the link for this video so that you have the specifics. I typically just eyeball it and throw it together. But I'll try to be a little bit more specific when I'm saying, like, how much you would really need. This was about a fourth of an onion. I like to chop them up as small as possible, so we'll go through it just a few times. Hopefully my eyes don't start watering. I do have onion goggles if I need them. They come in handy sometimes. This is the perfect thing that you can add on top of a regular salad, but you could also kind of just eat with crackers. Like, I love simple mills crackers. You could put it in a lettuce wrap. You could just put it on the side of the something that you're eating. You have like leftovers or something, and you just need a little bit of extra protein. This is a great way to get that in. And I also love it because it's an easy way to get your omega 3s. Now, omega 3s are so amazing for lowering inflammation. They're actually one of the most powerful nutrients for lowering inflammation. They're a fat, a polyunsaturated fat that your body can't make on its own, which is why they're essential. Need them from outside sources. And wild salmon happens to be one of the best sources of those omega 3 fats. My eyes are getting a little watery. Okay. So I love all the colors, too. I always try to aim for a variety of colors when I'm putting any dish together because the more colors, the more phytonutrients. So I'm going to just try to mix all of this and then we'll see if we need to add any extra. I typically will just eyeball the avocado oil, mayonnaise, and you can obviously go lighter or heavier based on your preferences and how you prefer. Basically think of it how you prefer your tuna salad. If you like making tuna salad, it's not that much different. Like canned salmon does not taste that much different from canned tuna. Canned tuna actually does have omega 3s, not as many as wild salmon. But the downside of the tuna is that it does come with mercury, which is a heavy metal and can have neurotoxic effects. So you want to keep your mercury exposure low, which is why I'll typically recommend just doing skipjack tuna. That's going to be like smaller tuna or just trying to avoid it altogether. Okay, my eyes are really starting to water. It's the power of those sulfur containing vegetables. You know, I always like to think about things like that or foods that stay in your cutting board. And it's like, wow, if it's that powerful on the outside, think of the power that it has on the inside of your body. Okay, I think this is good actually. I think that we have the right ratio of the onion and the avocado mayonnaise. Obviously I've made this a lot of times, so that's how I'm just basing it off of my experience and how I typically like it. Then you're good to go. So what I'll do is transfer this into a Tupperware and then just keep it in a sealed glass Tupperware. You don't want to do plastic. Putting them in glass helps to avoid the endocrine disruptors that you'll find in plastic. So the chia seed pudding is staple number two for your meal prep. To help to have more of these anti inflammatory staples on hand. I'm just going to put it in a glass Tupperware. Not a lot of ingredients. This is really simple. So I have some almond milk, some organic blueberries, vanilla extract, some salt and then some chia seeds. I'm going to take a cup of chia seeds and then we're gonna do four cups of almond milk. So typically the ratio that you wanna aim for is a 4 to 1 ratio of fluids to chia seeds. I'm so excited. I love chia seed pudding. Woo. Okay, so there's 1, 2, 3. Having a lot of chia seed pudding, especially if you have multiple people in your house, is really nice throughout the week. So that. And actually it'll last more than five days. The salmon salad is really the one that will probably only last about five days. Okay, so then we have the fourth cup here. I'm using this Khalifa farms unsweetened almond milk. Some people will say that it's better to just buy almond milk that has water and almonds. The reason that I like this is because it does add calcium, and I'm trying to really increase my calcium because of being pregnant. So there's 30% of your daily needs for calcium. If you're buying a brand that has very, very few ingredients, like just water and almonds, you're not going to have any additional calcium. So if you can get calcium from other foods, of course, like salmon and sardines have calcium. Plenty of other foods have calcium. But I just find that it's hard to meet my overall daily needs without that additional support from the almond milk. These bowls are so pretty, but they also are very temperamental. And so if you're using tongs or metal, they typically will scratch the bowls. So we're mixing up just the chia seeds in the almond milk. Again, a 4 to 1 ratio. And what's gonna happen is the chia seeds are gonna gelatinize. So the chia seeds, they love fluids, and they swell when they're exposed to water or any other kind of liquid. The benefit of that is that as they swell and gelatinize, they actually become a slippery form of fiber. When you're exposing it to, like, your digestive tract, that can really aid with regular bowel movements. Super, super helpful for supporting a healthy gut. In addition to, of course, lowering inflammation, the gut health properties are really next level. And as I've talked about in other videos, your gut health is the epicenter of your overall health. So the more that you can feed your microbes with these healthy fibers, the better off you're gonna be. Not only from a regularity standpoint, because not a lot of people talk about this, but you really should be having a bowel movement every single day. And hopefully it's a formed bowel movement. I don't know if this is tmi, but I talk about bowel movements all the time because it's really the greatest indicator of nutrition or your nutritional status, I think even more so than the number on the scale. I'm always asking people about their bowel movements. So you don't want it to be like soft serve ice cream. You want it to be like, formed. The chia seed pudding will help get you there. I just have this organic pure vanilla extract for some flavoring. I'm going to do two tablespoons of this, mix the vanilla extract into it, and then I'm going to add salt. I love Adding salt to a lot of things that most people probably wouldn't. I like Redmond Real Salt because it has more trace minerals compared to other salt companies. So I'm just going to add, like, a few dashes of salt, mix it in. I love the combination of fruit and salt. So, like, if I'm having an apple, I'll put salt on my apple slices. Then maybe do, like, a little bit of peanut butter or like a handful of nuts or something like that. So we have the base. We might need to just whisk out some of these clumps as the chia seed starts to harden and not harden, but swell. I guess that's the best way of saying it. So we're gonna let this sit. Once I put the blueberries in, and then in about 30 minutes, maybe 60 minutes, the Chia seeds should absorb all the fluid. And then you'll have the actual chia seed pudding that you can store in your refrigerator. We'll put it back into that glass Tupperware. I'm just gonna probably need two of those glass Tupperwares to make sure that I have enough space for the ever expanding chia seed pudding. Actually measure this one cup. I'm just putting in a strainer so that we can wash them. Two cups of blueberries. Now, some people might not want to add fruit to the chia seed pudding. You could always add it on top once you're eating it. I personally like putting the fruit in because it just helps to infuse some of the blueberry flavor into the recipe. My gosh, these blueberries are so beautiful. I love blue and purple produce. Most people are actually really deficient in the phytonutrients that are in blue and purple produce. So something to just be aware of. And then I'm just going to mix the blueberries in, and then we'll let this sit. We'll let the chia seeds absorb the fluid, and then we'll just transfer it to a Tupperware and you'll be good to go. Like I said, if you wanted to wait to add the blueberries on top, then you just would skip this step. By the fifth day or so, the blueberries will be a little mushy. I personally am fine with that, but if you don't like that, then just add them on top. Item number two is done. I wish I knew what time it was when we started so that I could really prove to you guys that this is possible to do in just in less than 60 minutes. Item number three is the big Random salad. Basically, what I do is I take any vegetables that I have. Ideally, I'd be planning it out in advance, but sometimes I don't. So I just go for whatever vegetables I have on hand, throw them all in a bowl, and I love having a salad. This is something that my parents actually do every week that I find to be so incredibly helpful. You always have vegetables that you can reach, and it makes them really accessible. So we're going to start with just some organic spring mix. This is from Trader Joe's. That really did the job. Pour them into the bowl. My gosh, they're so beautiful. I love the nutrient density of these foods and how clear the nutrient density is just by looking at these colors and thinking about how much these colors are going to do for the health of our cells. Cucumber First, I'm going to include this recipe so that if you want to just make exactly what I'm making, then you absolutely can. But any vegetables really work. The key is just having the vegetables on hand in a Tupperware so that when you are in the situation that you're trying to think of what you're going to eat and you're, like, tempted by the chips, the salad is just as quick as an option of grabbing that bag of chips. So much of these foods that are, you know, highly processed, they also are highly convenient. So if you can make the vegetables as convenient as the chips, then it might change the choices that you're making in the moment. That's something that we recommend to a lot of clients that go through our nutrition programs. I tend to like the cucumber a little bit more chunky, but again, you do you. The most important thing is that you enjoy the process of eating it. So whatever your preferences are is perfect. Okay, so now we just need to cut up the pepper and the onion. We'll do another fourth of an onion. We might need a half of an onion, but TBD on that. I'm just gonna slice this out, and then you can either slice it into really tiny pieces or you can do chunks. I'm kind of just gonna do something in between. I feel like when you're making things that also. Just thinking about, like the. Not only the color, but also the texture profile and the variation in the texture profile can really just make the overall eating process more enjoyable. Okay, so we have our pepper that's gonna go in the bowl, into our big random salad bowl, and then the last item that we'll add is this onion. So again, we're getting into these this purple family, they contain something called anthocyanins. In addition to being a sulfur vegetable, any purple vegetable, like our blueberries, our red onion, they have anthocyanins in them, which are a phytonutrient that has been shown to support brain health. There was actually one really interesting study that was done where they looked at people who ate a serving of blueberries every day. They were elderly individuals and the ones who ate a serving of blueberries every day had a two year decrease in cognitive decline. They essentially preserved their brain health for two additional years compared to, or what would have been two additional years compared to the people who didn't eat any berries. Super amazing the things that food can do to support your physiology. I might add a little more onion. Hopefully I don't start to cry just in talking about the benefits of the sulfur vegetables and the anthocyanins, I'm like, why not add a little more? And that's the thing. When you're making food and you're thinking about all the benefits of what it's going to do for your body, it becomes such a connected experience where food can really provide a lot of joy instead of all of the negative restrictions that a lot of people experience with yo yo dieting and trying to just continue to restrict and restrict. So I like to think of food from an abundant state of like, what is this doing for my body and for my cells, for my gut health, for my hormones, for my brain health, for my mitochondria, for my metabolic health. Like so many layers to it. So many layers to the onion too that are making me cry. Okay, so we have all of the ingredients for the salad. The only other thing that I'll add on the side will be dressing. So you don't want to dress it until you're actually. I'm going to eat the salad so that it stays good for longer. So, so these are our three items, guys. We have the salad, our chia seed pudding. You can see it's already starting to thicken a bit. So this will be perfect. Like I'll eat this for breakfast on top of some organic Greek yogurt. You could also have it as a snack in the mid afternoon. You could add a little bit of collagen to it. If you're trying to add a little bit more protein in just an afternoon snack, I like to add the Greek yogurt with it for a little additional protein. And then we have the salmon salad. You could also, just as a lunch idea, throw some of the salmon salad on top of the big random salad. And then you're good to go for lunch with a little bit of dressing on top. It'll take five minutes to assemble so that you don't have an excuse to not eat the nutrient dense foods when you just feel really tired. I feel so excited that I'm now prepped for the next five days. I like to think about my future self. Like on a Tuesday afternoon that's trying to go for the bag of chips. It's like, wait, hold up. There's no reason to do that. You have the big random salad, you can throw some salmon on it and you're good to go. I'm just gonna try the salmon salad. I think it's gonna be good. Perfect. Honestly, like perfectly dressed with the mayonnaise. Not too much but not too little. I love the crunchiness and the pickles. I just love the combination of the pickle flavor. Of course. If you don't like pickles, do you? And take them out. I think you're gonna love this if you try implementing this less than one hour on a Sunday. There are no excuses. If you feel like you are stuck in a routine that isn't serving your health, then spend one hour prepping these three anti inflammatory staples. Let me know how it goes. Tell me in the comments if there's anything else that you want to see, other recipes or those sorts of things that we can make anti inflammatory and low glycemic so that you feel better about eating them. I'd love to hear from you and I'll see you soon.