Life has a good way of reminding us that we are never in control. This year has brought on new challenges that we never thought we’d be dealing with. When faced with an unexpected health challenger or diagnosis there are 2 choices: fight and do what you can to help your body heal, or give up and resign to let it eventually beat you down. I wholeheartedly believe that food is medicine, so when we found out this year that my husband’s twenty year career as a Marine left him with some long term traumatic brain injuries that are just now starting to present, a “no brainer” move has been to tweak our diets to give him the best possible nutrition to boost brain health and regeneration.

Part of his developing condition was the onset of focal seizures, which are not the typical seizure that people think of, but incredibly debilitating and damaging nonetheless. The Ketogenic diet was originally created as a therapy diet to deal with brain conditions like seizures. We are DEFINITELY not newbies to food restrictions and special diets with all the food allergies and chronic issues that we have been through with our kids, so going Dairy Free Keto was a fairly simple tweak to the diet we already had. It mostly meant taking back out some of the carbs and sugars that we had slacked and let come back in even though we eat a very real food diet already.

For me, the biggest step in making a diet change for our family is the MEAL PLANNING! This is such a foundational part of our week anyway since without the meal plan my days and meals turn into chaos.

1) I have been using the app Plan To Eat for several months now, and highly recommend this for anyone wanting to organize or start their meal planning. I absolutely LOVE this app for scheduling, tweaking recipe changes, saving new found recipes and putting together a shopping list of the week’s meal plan ingredients. This makes a weekly shopping trip a breeze and ensures I have all the items stocked and ready to go for what we plan to eat each week.

2) Once I’ve dropped in both a breakfast and dinner meal plan each day of the week, I transfer them to our Meal Planning Menu board  that is front and center in our dining/kitchen area so the whole family knows what to expect each day.

3) Adding breakfast to our weekly meal planning has made a WORLD of difference in our homeschooling routine. I refuse to let the kids eat sugary cereal each morning and call it breakfast, so putting in some variety lets them know what they can expect and what they are only allowed to eat that in the morning, even if they wake up before anyone else. Let me tell you – this has been a GAME CHANGER!

Do you have a meal planning system that you love? Share it with us below! Stay tuned for some of our weekly KETO meal plans and compilation of recipes.