Winter is here. Prepare for an emergency on the road.

This is a link to a previous post I wrote.

Make a cold weather emergency kit and store it in the backseat of your car. NOT THE TRUNK!

If you have an emergency on the road there is no guarantee that you will be able to access the trunk.

Click HERE

When to Eat Supper/Dinner (Main meal of the day)

"In 1870, the American cookbook author Jane Cunningham denounced an alarming new trend in the nation's mealtime habits: eating dinner in the evening. Since the colonial era, Americans had eaten their primary meal around midday, fueling themselves for the rest of the workday. But with more men spending their days outside the home as wage laborers, dinner was becoming a nighttime affair. Critics like Cunningham hated this sign of the changing times. "Six o’clock dinners ... destroy health," she wrote in one of her cookbooks. Late-day meals were harder to digest, she insisted. Perhaps worse, they gave women more daytime for idle "gossiping and visiting to shopping and the promenade."" - Peter C. Baker, a Pacific Standard contributing editor, is a writer based in Illinois.

There is an old saying that "One should eat like a king for breakfast, eat like a Prince for lunch, and eat like a pauper for supper." The idea behind that is to eat the appropriate foods for the activities that you will do AFTER the meal. Far too many, most in fact, eat large meals AFTER high levels of activity. Why? Because they are hungry. But the body doesn't need those calories now, it needed those calories BEFORE the high activity level.

It is a waste of food and tends to cause weight gain when you eat large meals after your active period of the day. I eat a high protein and medium fat and carb meal for breakfast; typically Greek yogurt with oatmeal and mixed nuts mixed in along with a glass of half-orange juice and half-energy drink (I don't like coffee and this is my caffeine drink in the morning). I eat breakfast at between 0630 and 0730 in the morning (at my desk, at work, while reading the reports that came in over night).

My main meal of the day is lunch and that is typically my only cooked meal of the day. I have a fairly large, well-balanced meal at lunch, which is five hours into my ten hour workday. It is a well-looked forward to break.

After work I go to the gym and work out for 45-60 minutes and then have a protein drink and sometimes some raw vegetables for supper.  I generally have a small snack of meat and cheese with a glass of wine later in the evening.

Between breakfast and lunch I will have a small snack and I have another small snack between lunch and the end of my work day.

This spreads out my calories in a manner that most of them get burned by the follow on activity and I am being fueled most of the day so my energy and metabolic levels don't drop too much.

The only real problem with this is that I now work in an office and it is a fairly sedentary job. I do try to walk the building by going up all the steps to the top floor, down to the far side of the building, then down all the steps to my floor.

There are a lot of diet gurus out there. Self-declared experts that come up with hundreds of diet plans every decade. And while some of the plans are sound, they are very difficult for a two working-parent family to follow. How in the world would you have the time to shop for fresh food and cook delicious balanced meals every day? It can be done, but it is very, very hard.

This is where meal planning and shopping comes in handy. During the busy work week, crock pot meals are ideal. Prepare the ingredients the night before, dump them into the crock pot in the morning, and have a good meal that evening. If the kids are getting a good cooked meal at school each day, then the adults should be eating their big meal at lunch as well. Then the evening meal can be a cup of soup or chili and a salad; or a good sandwich, or some other light fare. These things can be prepared in advance or cook during the day to save time and effort in the evening.

Then on the weekends mom and dad can cook special meals with fresh foods that everyone enjoys. Make extra so you can reheat good food for lunches during the week. I cook almost all my work-week lunches during the previous weekend. I pack them into glass storage containers (I no longer microwave in plastic containers) to heat up and eat at work. I just grab a container in the morning and stash it in my insulated lunch bag with some cut up vegetables and a dessert. In five minutes I am packed and out the door.

I work a four-day work-week; four ten-hour shifts. So I only need four lunches for the week and I have three days at home for fresh cooked meals. So perhaps a little bit easier for me than someone working a longer work-week and with a shorter weekend.