I faught the kitchen and the kitchen won

Wow, I was so excited about the P90x diet plan. different levels for different people. Phases depending where you are in the program, all awesome stuff. I figured I'd go extreme and do the extreme meal plan. I had no idea what I was in for. Cooking till 2am trying to keep up. Ouch!

I mean really: 5 different sauces, 6 different soups, 5 different salads, 15 other recipes on one week!! I guess if you're unemployed you can pull that off but then you wouldn't have the money to buy all the ingredients. That's another thing, these aren't "combine 4 ingredients and cook" recipes either (A feature of the P90 meal plan). Some recipes have as many as 14 ingredients and 5 steps and stuff like dicing shallots and doing stock reductions.

I still like the idea of the meal plan but it's way to much effort. My current scheme is to make a bit of a hybrid between the meal plan and the portion approach. Oh and since I mentioned the portion approach I'll mention why I'm not doing that instead. Honestly I'm a little too anal for it. I would go crazy guessing at portion sizes and trying to figure out what counts as what. Does a chicken sandwich with cheese count as a fat/protein/carb and the guide only lists fats that in oil form so I have no idea what a portion of cheese would be.

So here is my current plan of attack:

• Prep 3 different types of soups (prepared on the weekend and frozen)
• Prep 3 different types of sauces (prepared on the weekend and frozen)
• Have 2-3 different fruits
• Have 2-3 different vegetables
  
• Prep 4 cups of wild rice on the weekend
• Combine several vegetables in one meal into a larger portion of 1 vegetable
  

These steps greatly reduce the effort in the meal plan. The soups, sauces, fruits and vegetables are pretty interchangeable. Most soups count as 1 Vegetable portion, most sauces count as 1.5 condiments etc... The other menu items are a little more complex and hard to change without affecting the portion balance. Also an added benefit of restricting the variety a bit is that you won't go broke eating partial portions of things and watching the rest spoil in your fridge I.E. 1/4 of a grapefruit once a week. Sorry but the rest O that grapefruit isn't going to hang around for a month waiting for you to finish it. I suppose this is probably the conclusion they expect people to reach but could they just say "Lunch, Day 1, one Soup from the recipes" etc. This would have made it obvious from the start. Also having 1 Cup of Quinoa (That's a vegetable I can't even find) and 1 Cup of Snap peas for one dinner. Come on just tell me to eat 2 cups of Snap peas.