Legacy Transformation Coaching Week 5

In this week's episode Corinne talks about one of the most practical topics in the whole program — because knowing what to eat is one thing, but being set up to actually do it in the reality of your busy life is something else entirely.

This week we cover:

Why your food environment matters more than your willpower — and what the research actually says about proximity and food choices

The FDN framework — Fast, Delicious Nutrition — and how to apply it in your real life

How to set up your pantry and fridge so that good choices become the easy choices

Meal planning made simple — not a seven day meal plan, just a rough sketch that actually works

The double up strategy from Peta — the one habit that saves more time than almost anything else in the kitchen

The hunger scale — how to use it before every meal and snack to build real body awareness

Your action steps for the week — purge your pantry, plan your meals, use the hunger scale

Whether you are a seasoned meal prepper or you feel like healthy eating falls apart by Wednesday every week, this episode will give you a clear and practical framework for making it work.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hey team, welcome to week five. And before we get deep into the content, I'm just going to take a quick moment to share some interesting research with you. Did you know that the average adult gains between half a kilo and a full kilogram of body fat every single year? That's not necessarily from anything dramatic, just from life. From being busy, eating on the run, not getting to our workouts, generally just not being set up to succeed. And here's what most people don't realise. Gaining as little as five kilograms over your adult life measurably increases your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure. So the thing is, even if your weight still looks fine on paper, even if you're sitting at a healthy BMI range, your visceral body fat, the fat around your vital organs, could have crept up five kilos over the last five years without you even knowing. And that can have a real effect on how you age, regardless of what the scales say. The Australian research confirms it that excessive weight gain through those mid middle years is one of the strongest predictors in chronic disease later in life. But congrats to you because you've decided to do something about that. You've showed up here, and now, five weeks later, you're still here. And that puts you in a very small group of people who actually follow through. So that's genuinely worth acknowledging. Now, this week we're shifting the gears slightly. So for your health track this week, we're covering what we call FDN, fast, delicious nutrition, and how to set up your environment, your kitchen, and your weekly systems so that good choices become easy choices. And here's another little bit of research that I love. Studies on behavioural eating patterns consistently show that food choices are heavily influenced by proximity. That means what's nearby, what's visible, what's easy to get to. We don't make food decisions based purely on our nutrition knowledge, we make them based on what's in front of us when we're tired, when we're hungry, running on empty, and often at the end of the day. Think about it this way. How many fast food restaurants do you drive past on the way home from work? And when you get home, tired, hungry, maybe a bit frazzled, what's actually in your kitchen that you can pull together in ten minutes? And here's where it gets tricky. If you already know that the pantry is looking a bit bare, then that drive home becomes a lot harder because every golden arch, every bucket of chicken, every pizza sign that you pass is suddenly a much easier option than the empty fridge waiting for you. You're not just tired, you're tired and under-resourced. And that combination is exactly why the easy option often wins. If the answer is not much when you open the fridge, that's not a willpower problem, that's an environment problem. And environment problems have environmental solutions. That's the whole premise of FDN. Fast, delicious nutrition. The idea that healthy eating doesn't have to be complicated, time consuming, or joyless. It just has to be set up right. So what does that actually look like in practice? Well, it starts with the pantry. So this week we want to do a proper purge. We want to go through the kitchen and clear out the things that are quietly working against us. The chips that call our name at nine o'clock at night, the chocolate in the top drawer, the crackers that you eat by the handful even when you didn't realise you've started. It's not that these foods are evil, it's that having them visible and within arm's reach when we're most vulnerable is setting us up to struggle. So what we want you to do is to remove them from the equation, or at the very least, make them harder to get to. And I mean that seriously. I actually know someone who bought a small safe to store her chocolates and treats. So no judgment, it actually worked for her. It just created that barrier to access and really brought conscious awareness before she opened the safe and chose to indulge. And you probably don't need to go quite that far, but sometimes just moving things to a less obvious cupboard and one that's not at eye level will just be that little barrier so that it's not the first thing you see when you open the pantry door. It can make a real difference in terms of purging. We also want to restock the fridge and the cupboard with good choices. Protein yogurts in the fridge, pre-washed vegetables ready that are already chopped, perhaps some boiled eggs, a batch of protein muffins in the freezer. Another easy win is keeping protein powder in the cupboard along with some frozen fruit that's already pre-portioned, ready to go for smoothies. I love things like corn thins with hummus and pickle spread, or even keeping some tuna and beetroot in the can in the cupboard, so you can pop some tuna and beetroot on those corn thins for that crunch factor. Popcorn, the culpable is a great one to stock. The idea is that when you open the fridge or the pantry at your hungriest, the first thing you see isn't is actually something that works for you. And this is where meal planning is that really big lever to pull here. And I want to be really clear, we're not talking about elaborate seven-day meal plans that take hours to put together. We're talking about a rough sketch. Three or four dinners for the week that your family will enjoy. A plan for lunches, this is a big one. Whether that's leftovers, or perhaps you want to batch cook some protein, the easy nourish bowls, or you might want to simply put together a salad with some salad bags from the supermarket and a rotisserie chicken that's pulled apart. You might also want to consider some pre-cooked grains or those pre-made quinoa and rice sachets that you can get from the supermarket. Remember too to include some snacks like your protein bars, your popcorn, things that you can have ready to make a smoothie bowl. Also, a big tip here, once you've done the shopping, don't just unpack the bags and walk away. There's a really great tip here that'll save you a lot of time down the track, and that's to think ahead about having your vegetables pre-washed and chopped. We're talking about things like chopping your onion and capsicum so that it's ready for your three-minute omelette that you can easily whip up first thing in the morning. Perhaps you're going to chop up your veggies for your stir fry so that when you come home from work you can simply throw that together with some chicken in the pan and your sauces. You might think about doing some pre-chopped carrot capsicum cucumber sticks to add to your afternoon snack or have them ready to put into small cubes and throw it into your salad to make it a much more nourishing salad. This is where things like adding some kimchi can be great as well because you're adding in some. This is where things like adding some kimchi and having that ready in your fridge that you can add to your salad or on the side of your plate is going to boost the fibre in your meal, but also the probiotics to help you with your gut health and digestion. And the thing is these veggies, particularly cucumber, carrot, capsicum, onion, they keep in the fridge really well for days. There's actually a salad in your cookbook called the CK salad, and this one uses all vegetables that start with the letter C or K, and it's a great one that stores in the fridge really well. You can easily scoop it out, pop it on your um plate for lunch with some nice chicken breast or whatever protein you've prepared to have. It sounds small, but these it sounds small, but this is exactly the kind of thing that separates the weeks where we're eating well and effortlessly from the weeks where it all falls apart by Wednesday. And the reason this works is because of something called decision fatigue. Every decision that you make across the day uses mental energy. And sometimes by the end of a long day, that mental energy is depleted. And when it is, your brain defaults to the path of least resistance. If that path of least resistance in your kitchen is a bag of chips, that's what happens. If it's a bowl of chicken and vegetables that takes four minutes to heat up, or a three-minute omelette with ham that's easy to throw together, then that's what happens. The food is the same effort. It's the system that's different. And one more thing I want to add here, and I really love this analogy, you know, think about brushing your teeth. You don't decide every morning whether you're going to brush your teeth, you just do it. It's habitual, it's automatic. It doesn't require motivation or willpower, and that is exactly what we're working toward with your eating. Not perfection every day, but a system that makes good choices feel as natural as brushing your teeth. And well done because you're building it week by week, meal by meal. And nobody sees this more up close than Peter, who does our 28-day program. So I'm going to let her share another tip for you, one that actually works.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Hey team, Peter here. I just want to share what I see makes the biggest difference for the women I work with when it comes to food prep. And it's not complicated. It's not hours in the kitchen on a Sunday. It's one simple habit, the double up. Whatever you're already cooking for dinner, make double. If it's a chicken stir fry, double the batch, and you've got lunch sorted for the next two days. If it's bolidets, make extra and pour it over roasted veggies or zucchini noodles tomorrow night. Taco mints, double it. Works in a wrap, on rice, or in a bowl. You're already at the stove. It takes three extra minutes and saves you from standing in the kitchen again tomorrow wondering what to eat. The women who make the most progress aren't the ones with the most elaborate meal plans. They're the ones who found three to five meals they love and just keep rotating them. Simple, repeatable, delicious. That's the goal.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Your health track lesson this week has the full breakdown of all of this, including meal planning, daily planning, batch cooking, and healthy takeaway options, how to navigate dining out. So make sure you have a good look through that. Remember as well, you've got the meal planning resource in the resource tab and also in your workbooks. And one more thing, if you haven't already seen it, please make sure you jump into the resources tab. So it comes down to simple, repeatable, delicious. That's basically FDN in three words. Your health track lesson this week has the full breakdown of all of this, including meal planning, daily planning, batch cooking, and healthy takeaway options, how to navigate dining out. So make sure you have a good look through that and read all that content. Remember as well, you've got the meal planning resource in the resource tab and also in your workbooks. And one more thing, if you haven't already seen it, please jump into the lesson this week. It's also in the resources. We've put together some meal prep inspiration. Included in it are lots of links to some of our favorite accounts that we follow on Instagram that include quick and easy recipe ideas. And of course, make sure you have a good look through our own cookbooks, and all you need to do is find one or two recipes that appeal to you. Take a screenshot of that recipe and save it somewhere, like in the notes within your phone. The goal is to build a personal collection of go-to meals that you actually love making, and that's what makes this sustainable. So let's jump into your mindset lesson this week, and this one connects very directly to everything that we've just talked about. Your mindset lesson is about emotions, desire, and discipline. It's a really rich one, so be sure to do the full read through in the app. But here's the thread that we're going to pull through now. And we've touched on this moment before. It's when you're standing in front of the fridge at nine o'clock at night, you're not really hungry, but you're reaching for something anyway. But this week we want to look at that from a different angle. Not just what's happening, but why it keeps happening, even when we know better. Here's what's actually going on. Your brain is wired to seek immediate pleasure. And in a world full of engineered, highly palatable, incredibly convenient foods designed by teams of scientists to make them as irresistible as possible, relying on willpower alone is genuinely not a fair fight. The processed food industry has spent billions of dollars making their products hit the pleasure centers of our brain in ways that natural foods simply don't replicate. And that's not a character flaw, that's simple neuroscience. So what do we do about it? We stop fighting it with willpower because we know that willpower is finite and that it runs out. And we start designing systems that remove the need for it entirely. That's what purging the pantry is really all about. That's what batch cooking is all about. That's what planning your meals in advance is about. It's not about restriction, it's about design. Designing a life where the easy choice and the good choice are the same choice. And when desire does show up, which it always does, when that urge comes to reach for something that doesn't really serve you, when that feeling hits, there is a really practical tool that you can use, and that is to set a ten-minute timer. Don't fight the urge, don't shame yourself for having it. Just give it ten minutes. And in that time, you move your body, you make a cup of tea, you might call someone or simply just step outside and put your feet on the earth, do some grounding. As Eckhart Tolli would call it, it's creating space between you and the desire or you and the urge. And then after that space, after that time has moved, check in with yourself again. Because more often than not, the urge has passed. And if it hasn't, you can then make a conscious and deliberate choice rather than an automatic one. And that's the difference. You're not trying to become someone who never wants chocolate. You are becoming someone who gets to choose consciously without guilt whether or not you have chocolate. And that's the real freedom. And that is what this program is building. And now let's move on to your action track for this week. We've got three things, they're all practical and doable. First up, let's go through the pantry and purge and pillage the fridge. So set aside 30 minutes to go through your kitchen, clear out or relocate the things that make it harder to stick to the program and to stick to your goals, and restock with the things that make it easier. Second, plan your meals for the week. Nothing elaborate, just do a rough sketch, use the meal planner guide, prep your lunches, think about snacks that you can have on the go, write it down because you do it is so much easier to follow that plan if you've got it written down. Take that little bit of time, and if you get a chance, make sure you try some online shopping this week. Once you've created that online shopping list, it takes it saves literally hours out of your week back and forth from the shops. And often we eat the same things regularly so that shopping list becomes saveable and repeatable, which in turn makes access to good food easy. Remembering that the act of planning reduces decision fatigue and makes the follow-through less dramatic and more likely. And third, check out the hunger scale lesson this week and start using it. You'll find it in the Action Track lesson in the app. And this tool is really a powerful tool. Here's how it works. The scale runs from one to ten. One is ravenous. You're shaky, you're irritable, you're completely distracted by food. That is the danger zone where you're most likely to grab whatever's quickest, whatever's easiest. 10 is when you're stuffed, uncomfortably full. That heavy regret feeling when you know you've overdone it. Neither end of the scale feels good. The sweet spot that we're aiming for is somewhere in the middle. Before every meal and every snack, just take 10 seconds to check in with yourself. Where am I on the scale right now? Aim to eat when you're sitting around three or four, when you're genuinely hungry, your body is ready for food, but you're not desperate. And aim to stop eating around six or seven. When you feel satisfied and nourished, hunger is gone, but you're not stuffed. It sounds simple and it is, but most of us have spent so long eating on autopilot that we have genuinely lost touch with what hunger and fullness actually feel like. The scale helps you to find that again. So take 10 seconds before you eat, that's all it takes, to start building that real body awareness again. Remember to purge the pantry, plan those meals, use the hunger scale. That's your week. So that's week five done team. And just remind yourself that even if you can't quite see it yet, your thinking is shifting, your habits are forming, the foundation is being laid. So keep building one meal, one choice, and one week at a time. I'll see you in the next lesson. Take care.