Friday, February 21, 2014

Organizing our Medifast meals

When doing Medifast for two people, you have a lot of food on hand. For Christy and me, the bulk of our daily food is in our first 4 meals, and we're taking these with us to work, so we need to have a system to manage all the different things we eat.

Inside our Pantry Door

First off are the ready to drink shakes... these are easy, they get placed on a shelf in the fridge. Spares are put in the pantry shelving.

Second there's the 'extra' boxes. We go through a LOT of pretzels, cereal, and mac and cheese. The extra boxes of these get put into our pantry shelving. In addition our 5th medifast meal (Brownies, Puddings, Chocolate Chip Cookies) all get placed into a large bin in the shelving unit.

But then there's the stuff we eat every day. We have a Pantry Door organizer that we got from the Container Store, it's a White Elfa Over the Door Rack unit. I'm considering adding a couple more shelf units now that it has gone from 'general storage' to 'almost everything we eat'. Especially since it's clear we have room for 1 if not two more and that would make things a little easier.

The top row is cereal, Cinnamon Crunch and Mixed Berry. We eat 1-2 of these a day (I prefer shakes in the morning, but cereal is a nice change of pace, while my wife prefers the cereal).

The second row is lesser-used items. Crunch Bites, Puffs, Sloppy Joe and Chili. We never have a ton of this stuff and they aren't daily items, but it's nice to keep an eye on them for potential re-orders.

Next up is Bars... Organized mostly by type, but there's some overlap... currently it's holding Caramel Crunch, S'Mores, Chocolate, Chocolate Mint, Cinnamon Roll, and Peanut Butter Chocolate Crunch Bars, as well as Chocolate Peanut Butter and Cookie Dough Chewy Bars. The bars are one of our favorite things, and we really like the variety, so we have a ton of these on hand. We use at least 2 and up to 4 of these a day.

Finally, in the bottom, we've got pretzels and Mac and Cheese. We eat both type of pretzel, cinnamon and honey mustard, so those are on either side of about a week's worth of Mac and Cheese. Both of us greatly prefer these to the other hearty meals and crunchy snacks, so we generally eat 4 of these a day between us.

By having this system it's really easy to grab your 4 meals for the work day, and it lets us keep track of what we're running out of, so we know what to make sure to order more of on our next order.

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