Time is running out for my 30-day emergency meal plan! I am still hard at work on it with just a few more calculations to run. In the meantime, I wanted to share the breakfasts and snacks I have come up with so far.

My final challenge is to try to pull together all these breakfast, lunch, and dinner options to see if a healthy plan meeting most of the recommended nutritional requirements is possible!

The sodium count is by far the most challenging. Fortunately, there are many people now on low sodium diets that have forced food manufacturers to come up with lower sodium versions of almost every product. Making simple changes, like swapping out one brand of pancake mix for another had a huge impact on the overall sodium count. It has also been eye-opening for me to discover how much sodium is in so many different foods, including ones you don’t think of as being “salty.”

Since our family generally likes cereal, oatmeal and pancakes for breakfast and would be ok eating these things over and over again, I didn’t try to come up with 6 different options for breakfast. Instead, I came up with the following four:

	1. All-Bran Strawberry Medley Cereal with nonfat powdered milk and 1 can Dole pineapple chunks. (400 calories, 365 mg sodium)
	2. Quaker Instant Oatmeal (plain) made with powdered milk and raisins with hot chocolate to drink. (500 calories, 195 mg sodium)
	3. Arrowhead MIlls Oat Bran pancakes made with dried dates and served with maple syrup. (420 calories, 177 mg sodium)
	4. 2 Carbquik biscuits (a lower sodium and higher fiber biscuit mix alternative) with gravy from a packet mix, with one cup natural applesauce and a packet of dried fruit. (320 calories, 480 mg sodium)

One thing I have learned in my food planning research is that it is really hard to get enough daily calories out of your main meals without adding any snacks. Generally if you have enough calories in the main meal, you are blowing the sodium count, fat count or some other nutritional guideline. So it generally works out better nutritionally to have somewhat smaller meals and more snacks. Some dieters swear by this method of eating as well to curb hunger cravings.

What are my staple emergency snacks?

	1. 2 unsalted rice cakes with 4 Tablespoons chunky peanut butter (450 calories, 240 mg sodium)
	2. Fiber One Oats n’ Chocolate granola bars (140 calories, 90 mg sodium, 9 g fiber)
	3. Fruit bits or raisins (~120 calories, 20 mg sodium)
	4. 2 oz raw cashews (or other raw nuts) (320 calories, 0 mg sodium)
	5. 9 Hershey Kisses (an indulgence to be sure but a relatively low-fat way to get in your chocolate fix) (200 calories, 35 mg sodium)
	6. Low-salt baked potato chips. (120 calories, 115 mg sodium). It is really hard to find low-salt or no-salt chips locally but the Internet offers numerous options for a salty snack with less guilt.

In my next post, I hope to pull this all together into a 6-day meal plan (that can be repeated 5 times for a 30-day plan) for a male, female and child. Stay tuned!