My experience with Meal Mentor
As I posted earlier this year, I signed up for Meal Mentor to help with meal planning, healthier meals and weight loss. After consistently using it for dinners (and mostly eating the leftovers for lunches) since January 1st, I can write a review about my experience.
At first, I wasn’t sure this was going to work for us. I am glad I gave it a chance and kept trying it. The meals are so healthy, it was a bit of an adjustment for me to stop using oil and processed food. The kids are picky and won’t always eat what I make- but that happens anyway unless we have pizza and enchiladas all the time, so I don’t factor their preferences in completely.
What I really like about the plan:
Variety of recipes: Every week there is a new set of meals emailed over. The items are very creative and keep everything interesting. There is flexibility in deciding what meal works best each evening since I already have all the ingredients for the week.
Healthy meals: I would describe these meals as “relentlessly healthy”. Instead of sautéing in oil, broth or water is recommended. I’m almost to my 6th year veganniversary, and while my reasons have never been about diet, I needed to be much more thoughtful about my food choices. I know if I am following the Meal Plan, that these have had nutritional oversight and are balanced and low calorie. They can be made gluten free and soy free.
Shopping lists: The list is super well organized and makes it easy to hand off to Jonathan my personal shopper. The ingredients are inexpensive, whole food, plant-based and easy to find. No pomegranate balsamic vinegars. These are simple items like lentils, rice, vegetables, hummus, salsa, beans and spices, etc.
Support group: Their is a special Facebook community for annual members that is wonderful. Lindsay S. Nixon (the founder/creator) pops in personally and answers questions. We post photos (or illustrations) of our meals, share tips, success stories and help keep each other motivated. I have not seen any snark, judgment or negativity that is common online. I feel like I have a new group of friends.
I have not used the meal prepping concept yet, but it is set up so that you can batch prep or cook the meals in advance.
Eating healthy food, all made from scratch seems time-consuming. This has helped me enormously. My taste buds have really adapted to loving these recipes, and I actually don’t want to stray away from them. The recipes list the amount of time each one is to make, so I can decide if I want to take 5 minutes or 20.
Personally, I had a weight loss goal with this. I had a slow start to this, and have only lost 5 pounds so far, which is not anything exceptional. However, I had a breakthrough recently thanks to Lindsay and this group and it feels as if things are going to be a lot easier for me now. I’ve been tracking what I eat by drawing it (I also enjoy doing food illustrations). You can see a lot of the Meal Mentor plan recipes on my instagram feed. I made it a goal to post every single day in February.
If you want to give it a try, there is one free sample week available on the website, and you can get a glimpse of the menu items for each week. Let me know if you join!
