I've stood in my own laundry room at night, eating chocolate I hid behind the detergent, wondering how I ended up hiding food from a five-year-old. More than once. That question followed me through most of last winter, while I was trying to figure out postpartum weight loss and meal prep at the same time, in the kind of Chicago winter that seems built to keep you on the couch.
Here is the thing about winter wellness when you live here: nobody warns you that the cold makes the whole project harder. Your body wants carbs and blankets. Mine certainly did. I spent a full year feeling awful about the weight from my second pregnancy before I did anything real about it, and even then, my first real attempt wasn't meal prep at all. It was SlimFast shakes, because a friend swore by them and they looked easy enough to grab on the way out the door.
They did not work for me. By 10am I was hungrier than I'd been before I even started, snapping at my kids over nothing, and eyeing the pantry like it owed me money. That was the moment I understood I needed actual food, not a shake standing in for a meal, and that's what finally pushed me toward real freezer meal prep instead.
The Freezer Habit That Actually Got Me Through a Chicago Winter
Okay so, my first real attempt at meal prep wasn't the freezer chili you see up top. It was kale salads. Beautiful, cold, lemony kale salads I prepped on a Sunday and felt very proud of. By Tuesday, with slush in the driveway and both kids fighting over one blue crayon, I looked at that cold salad and felt something close to rage. Wednesday ended in deep-dish pizza. FAILURE, all caps, no notes.
That flop taught me something useful: nobody wants cold food when it's freezing outside. So I switched to what I think of as heat-and-eat meals — turkey chili, lentil soup, big pots of something that fills the kitchen with cumin while the snow piles up outside. Meals like that work partly because a full bowl of something light beats a small plate of something dense, at least for how full I actually feel an hour later.
What Actually Goes in the Freezer Each Sunday
I shop for most of it at Mariano's in Elmhurst before the batching even starts, and by now I've got the aisles nearly memorized — that part alone is a whole grocery strategy I could write a separate post about. I double every batch, one pot for that night and one for the freezer, labeled on the dry-erase board stuck to my fridge so future-me knows what past-me was thinking. The batching itself happens every single Sunday now, a system that took me most of that fall to actually get right. There's a real chart somewhere for how long soup or chili safely lasts frozen, and I keep a copy taped inside a cabinet, because guessing is how food gets wasted.
My friend Bridget has opinions about meal-kit subscription boxes that nobody asked for, and she'll tell you unprompted that a freezer stash beats any box that shows up on your porch. She might be right. The drawer where I keep containers is a disaster — there's one lid in there that takes both hands and a word I try not to say in front of the kids just to snap shut, and it's somehow always the one I grab first. The containers themselves matter more than people think for keeping things fresh, and I've tested more of them than I'd like to admit. If you want a starting point, I've got a full list of the Best Slow Cooker Chicken Recipes for Healthy Postpartum Meal Prep that got heavy rotation those first few weeks.
A reader named Fern emailed me once after trying one of those crockpot recipes, just to say it was the first thing her toddler hadn't rejected outright in months. We've traded grocery ideas back and forth since then, and she always tells me straight when something didn't work, which is rarer than you'd think from people who comment on a food blog.
Is Cutting Calories Safe While You're Still Nursing?
Short answer: not the way most generic weight-loss advice describes it. If you're breastfeeding through a Chicago winter, your body is already working overtime just to keep you warm on top of making milk. Drop your intake too far and supply can dip fast. I leaned on healthy fats instead of just cutting portions — avocado, salmon, nuts — because a straight calorie slash left me wiped out by mid-afternoon. I also leaned on Portion Control for Weight Loss Without Ever Counting Calories, because chasing two kids around the house doesn't leave time to measure rice by the gram.
Nursing also does strange things to how your body handles weight that have nothing to do with willpower, which is its own whole topic I've gone deep on separately. Some days my hands and face looked puffier than others, which I now understand has more to do with sodium and water than anything I actually ate that day. I also noticed how much of what felt like hunger between drop-off and lunch was really just me not drinking enough water, a mixed-up signal that's more common than anyone admits. None of this replaces an actual conversation with your doctor or a lactation consultant, and I'd genuinely tell you to have that conversation before changing much while nursing.
The Afternoon My Five-Year-Old Called Me 'The Old You'
There's a moment I keep coming back to. My daughter looked at an old photo on my phone, pointed at it, and said that was "the old you" — like I was a different person who'd simply moved out. I laughed, handed her a snack, and kept it together until she wandered off to find her brother. Then I sat down on the kitchen floor for a minute. It wasn't some scientific turning point. It's just the thing that made the freezer meals feel a lot less optional.
Trying a Supplement When Nothing Else Was Moving the Needle
By the middle of January, deep in a blizzard week that kept all three of us stuck inside for days, I hit a wall. Gray skies, zero motivation, and I was doing actual math on how many bites of my toddler's leftover chicken nuggets would blow my whole day. Half of what I was calling hunger that week was probably just the stress-eating loop that shows up the second both kids start yelling at once — something I didn't clock until it had happened three or four times. I'm generally skeptical of supplements as a category — most of them are noise — but I was also stuck on a couch with a monitor clipped to my waistband and no real way to be active, so I started using CitrusBurn to see if it helped at all.
I followed the label, didn't expect a miracle, and honestly just wanted something that made the plateau feel less permanent. There's a whole gut-health angle to postpartum weight that I won't get into here, but it's part of why I was curious in the first place. I wrote the longer version of that month in Why I Use CitrusBurn for Weight Loss After Months of Slow Progress, including the parts where it didn't do much and the parts where it actually helped me get off the couch.
By Week Six, Something Actually Shifted
By late February I'd been doing the freezer routine for about six weeks, not perfectly — the chocolate-in-the-laundry-room habit never fully went away, and that's its own sugar story for another day. But the consistency added up. Some of that bone-tired winter feeling turned out to be as much about inflammation as it was about sleep, which is a separate rabbit hole I won't fall into here. I went from feeling heavy and half-asleep most afternoons to actually having the energy to pull both kids around the block on a sled without my heart pounding through my coat.
This wasn't about looking a certain way by spring. It was about not dreading the mirror every morning, and about proving to myself that November-me and February-me didn't have to stay the same person forever.
My Actual Thaw-Ready Routine
If you're starting from zero, keep it simple. Big batch soups — lentil, vegetable beef, white bean — freeze well and stretch a long way. I make egg bites in a muffin tin for protein breakfasts I can grab one-handed while hunting for a missing mitten, since protein keeps me full a lot longer than toast ever did. I also flirted with cutting gluten for a stretch that winter, which taught me more about the difference between elimination and plain restriction than I expected. I keep a bag of frozen vegetables as backup for the nights the freezer stash runs dry, and I switched from plain water, which I never remembered to drink, to warm herbal tea, which I actually finish, standing at the kitchen sink looking out at the neighbor's fence while it steeps.
None of this comes from medical training, so if your energy is completely bottomed out, please talk to an actual professional — Chicago winters are hard on mental health too, not just waistlines. But a freezer full of food you actually planned for makes a HUGE difference when the snow is two feet deep and a grocery run feels impossible.
If you're looking for a jumpstart the way I was, CitrusBurn is the one extra thing that actually fit into my schedule during that stretch when nothing else was moving. The bigger lesson, though, has nothing to do with any product: the plan that survives a Chicago winter is the boring one you can repeat every single week, not the impressive one you can only manage once.