CrossFit South Bend

In this interview we sit down with Coach Megan to talk about her thoughts on healthy eating.

For those of you don’t know Megan she is:
-currently a high school science teacher
-a CrossFit coach
-training to be a nutrtion coach
-a mom of three

In this video Megan tells us:
-What eating was like for her growing up
-Her personal evolution when it comes to healthy eating
-What she currently eats on a daily basis with concrete examples
-What she’s learned about healthy eating given all the different commitments in her life
-What her favorite off-plan foods are
-Her favorite special occasions to eat off-plan food.

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Transcript:

– Hey guys, Robby here from CrossFit South Bend today I am here with coach Megan and she is going to be telling us about her life with food. So Megan, thank you so much for joining us today.

– Thank you.

– So first of all, Megan tell us what food was like for you growing up.

– Huh, very traditional, cereals for breakfast. My parents both came from farmers. And so they kinda were raised on kinda real whole food initially. So we, although we had processed things like mac and cheese, ramen noodles, they were always like a big favorite as a kid, and cereals. My mom usually made dinner at night. She’d kind of throw together whatever veggies, meat, we’d have lots of butter and whole milk and stuff like that. But yeah, I think their background kind of lended itself. The problem was that is they also loved food and food was always around the table. So portion control and active lifestyle was not necessarily part of our life growing up.

– Right, okay, so tell us about your journey through healthy eating. Like when you first started thinking about healthy eating to how you eat now and then we’ll get to you know actually how you’re eating at the moment.

– Okay, so yeah because we always kind of had food and was always making food that was always part of my life. Always how I ate. High school, college, you go off and there’s a lot of processed, a lot of convenience, and then got married and you kinda started playing with food, I realized I liked to cook. But there was still a lot of convenience, like Hamburger Helpers in the first couple years of marriage. And so you kind of didn’t have, had an idea of what things sort of were healthy but not a real clear idea. And kids, time, fast forward to about three years ago, no?

– Yeah, pretty much.

– I got into the Whole 90, with you and then did food journaling for a year. And took a lot of I think what a background was and then was able just to change and tweak things. And so now it’s very much real whole food, minimally processed stuff, trying to get the healthy fats, the quality protein, the veggies. So yeah, the last, I would say the last three years have been, I’ve felt really good and confident about my food. And it was not, it’s nice because I didn’t worry so much about weight. You know, that was always kind of a part of food. Like it was more like food was something I had to manipulate to be a certain way or to look a certain way or and so it’s kind of been a nice shift for me within the last several years to I like my food and it doesn’t, I know it fuels me and I’m not so worried about having to take something out or limit yeah.

– So tell us a little bit about how you are eating now. Like what typical foods you might eat and then you know you brought some meals with you.

– Yeah okay, I feel like I have to preface a little bit that I don’t meal prep. I have the three kids, I have three kids, a 12 year old, a nine and a six year old. So I’m making dinner every night anyway. So most of our foods are dinners, I make large portions dinner. And then I will sometimes eat that for breakfast or I’ll get it for sure for lunch, Mike and I take them for lunch. So, like I said dinners are usually. This is a good one to start with. So this is a pork steak that I don’t know can you see, pork steak that we had one night, roast potatoes. We love roasting potatoes. I roast sweet potatoes, potato wedges, big, little potatoes, salt, pepper, whatever seasoning. And then we roast brussels sprouts, we’ll roast broccoli, and then we’ll kind of have this. Often we’ll have, they’re like a lettuce, grains, and have a small side salad on there. If you haven’t seen my video on the buffalo chicken patties or you haven’t checked out that recipe, this is my go to, and we’re on the Whole 30 right now so this is like, I make it and I have it in the fridge always. And I put it over greens, and then it comes with like a mayo dressing on top so the fat it’s super great. This was dinner last night, cauliflower rice with the teriyaki chicken. There’s some chicken down under there and it had like zucchini and broccoli and carrots and onion and pineapple and all over cauliflower rice. So it’s a lot of veggies, a lot of protein, I’m very liberal on my fat when I’m cooking. I like my fat a lot so, but it varies, so we have like soup, we love soup, we have soup once a week. It’s just different every night.

– Yeah.

– So.

– Those look delicious, very well presented, very easy.

– Literally I threw them, like it’s just leftovers from dinners this week so.

– Yeah they look great. So I always in these videos like to talk about kind of unique aspects of someone’s life, you know, Andrew was a college student, and you know, Carl’s a rugby coach and all of these different things. So you are an anatomy and physiology teacher. You are a mom of three, you are a CrossFit coach, you are an athlete, you have all these different responsibilities and life things going on. Tell us how healthy eating fits into and relates to that and time constraints and kids and just anything you’d like to talk about with relation to that.

– I very much have taken on, in all of this, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed and want to like jump headfirst into everything. So as I was thinking back about things, I’ve taken on the approach of like put on my oxygen mask first. So that’s really where it boils down to, is I’ve figured out what I needed to do for me to feel better personally, better in the gym. And so I made those changes for me and then Mike was like okay if you’re making dinner I’ll eat whatever you’re making for dinner but I’m still gonna eat whatever over here. And then he’s come on board, come a long way, just you know slowly, and now we’re getting into the kids. So to help with that, like for me, I like to prep, not meal prep, but like I have to have a plan for the week.

– Right.

– So I make my menus, it’s like my thing, if I don’t know what I’m making that week, and I haven’t gone and bougthen the things it’s just, it all falls apart very quickly and it can get ugly. So I make my lists and then, and then we just you know I try to think about what’s going on in my week and the easier meals to put together go on those busy nights and then the ones that take a little bit more time is those nights that I’m not coaching. You know, the insta pot is Tuesday, Thursday. Yeah, those are the nights that like I’m coaching, you know, going on. So a part of it, like really when it comes to food, a lot of it is convenience but to keep my family happy like I have to have something that is going to be taste good and that the kids are going to be interested in. If the kids aren’t interested into it then life becomes difficult. So it’s kind of this juggling like I make it to the quality that I want it to be I just try to search new recipes to fit the family. The time or the picky eaters, the little ones, so.

– Good and you’re doing a–

– Whole 30-ish, is that–

– Yeah, yeah.

– Yeah, so this year was the first year at like, I said Mike kind of got on board and so this year I was like I’m gonna do a Whole 30 in February after my birthday. And so Mike has been eating really well with us and he’s like I think we all should. Okay! So I wasn’t quite there yet but the words came out of his mouth and then it was kind of like well let’s try it, we’ll see. So we are doing a Whole 30 with all three kids, ish. Now I would have to say there’s certain tweaks that I’ve, like it’s not perfect Whole 30 with kids but little things here or there that we’ll let slide. Like I put some plantain chips in their lunch or something like that. But yeah the kids are on day 23, 24, something like that. So the real test is today when they come home with their Valentine’s Day candy.

– Right.

– They know they’re to put it in the cupboard and wait ’til next week but we’ll see. But it’s going really well, you know, the buy-in with the, we talked, prepped them a lot before, before doing a Whole 30. And then some of the buy-in was getting them to look at my recipe books and figure out what they might want to have for dinners. And so then we made the things they wanted for dinners. And sure enough a couple meals that they’re like eh, lukewarm on. You know, every night they’re like this was good, it was good and they haven’t really bocked too much. They do like day dream about doughnuts and candy and bread ’cause you know I had taken cereal out of the house but breads, milk, sugar being the big things that they had to get rid of so. But yeah, it was, I thought I’ll give it a week, we’ll see how it goes and we’re on week, three weeks now.

– So–

– Wow.

– Yeah.

– That’s fantastic.

– For me it was a success whether it was–

– Yeah, that’s huge I mean, yeah I mean to just do it you and Mike let alone you know the entire family I think, that’s definitely an amazing accomplishment.

– Thanks. Yeah now the tricky part is I have to figure out what I’m gonna, like where do we go after these 30 days.

– Right.

– So, we’ll figure out that.

– Cool, let’s talk about nutritional off-roading. So as you know very well we typically like to talk about you know completely off planned foods in the context of special occasions. So tell me A about like special occasions that are meaningful to you in terms of food and then B like what are your favorite like, I don’t care, I just want to have it. Whatever it is, it’s like my favorite off plan food.

– Oh, that’s a good question. Special occasions, obviously the holidays. But even then I liked what Brandon talked about, you know like if I have to, if I really want it, like and where my willpower is in all of that. You know, I can have holidays and still be really good and say to the dessert.

– Right.

– There’s a certain thing my mom’s rolls at Christmas time like–

– Yeah.

– Yeah, a lot of my special occasions tend to be I try to like save those for like our anniversary or date nights and usually they are to a special place that we like to go. Like our favorite like pizza is usually my thing. Or wine or something like that, but that, so those are my favorites. We have certain things like special occasions, like tailgates, oh we go camping every year. And like, actually, the last two years have pretty good though but, I don’t know. It’s hard because there’s a context for everything just to say.

– Right.

– But pizza is a good one, burger, like a really good burger. And if it’s baked goods like cake, I really like cake, that’s my kind of, but I don’t eat it all the time so like it’s–

– Right, it’s very infrequent.

– Yeah.

– Yeah.

– Yeah, but those are my like–

– Go tos.

– Go tos.

– That’s a good list, I like that list.

– Yeah.

– It’s more me. Okay well, I think I’d like to end with the sense, you know you’ve already mentioned some great advice to people about you know, put your oxygen mask on first. Is there anything else, you’d like to share about your own personal journey through food or dealing with your family or any other nuggets of wisdom that you’ve encountered over the years that you’d like to share with others starting out maybe.

– Yeah take care of yourself, that’s a big one. Every once in awhile, I’ll stop and I’ll think about how far I’ve come, especially in my kitchen. I remember when I was first starting and looking at recipes and I’m like coconut amino what? And fish sauce huh? And you know all these things that seemed so foreign and my guess one of my biggest recommendations is to start little, like it doesn’t have to be a huge transformation at first. It was, I took this one recipe and I tried the coconut aminos and I made this and I tweaked that and it worked out okay and then it was just little things along the way. So it doesn’t have to be a complete 180 or life changing immediately. It was, I did a little bit that I could along the way. Like do your best until you know better and then you do better, you know that quote. And so I’ve just, okay well I’m gonna try this now and I’m gonna incorporate this. And so and there’s no endpoint, like I’m still learning new things and I’m still trying new things. So I just, it’s kind of a fun, it’s just a constant experiment I think for me. And I just have fun kind of playing with it and learning more and trying more. I don’t know, that’d probably be, yeah.

– Cool, well thank you so much for being with us today, I appreciate it.

– You’re welcome.

– All right guys, thanks so much for tuning and we’ll see you next time.