What Does a House Cleaner Eat?

What does a house cleaner eat to stay energized throughout the day? As business owners, it’s important to keep energy up to stay on top.

Is there a special diet to maintain good health that will sustain you while house cleaning?

Listen: What Does a House Cleaner Eat?

Watch: What Does a House Cleaner Eat?

Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.

What Does a House Cleaner Eat to Maintain Energy?

What does a house cleaner eat to maintain energy throughout the course of the entire day? I’ve been in the house cleaning for almost three decades, and this is one of the things that is super important for me personally. I’m going to share with you my personal story because I’m not a nutritionist, a health food expert or any of those things, I am a house cleaner.

So, I am the biggest tool that my business will ever have, and so keeping myself in shape and making sure I have enough energy to get through the day is super important.  Sometimes if you wear a Fitbit, you will do anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 steps in the course of a day cleaning houses. So, there’s a lot of movement, but you need to be able to maintain that, so what does that look like and what do you eat?

I am Not the Best Cook

So for me, and I have a true confession of not loving to cook, I am not a great cook. Now, I know how to cook, but I don’t cook, and I choose not to cook because it’s a colossal waste of my time.

So, what I do is cook one day a month.  I go to Costco and I buy all my foods and vegetables, or I pick them up from the farmers’ market. Now there’s a Lidl in town, so sometimes I go to Lidl and I buy fresh fruits and vegetables, and I bring them all home and I do one cooking session.

I bring out all my Crock-Pots and I cook everything at once, then repackage them and put them in the freezer..

People Always Ask About What I Eat

I get a lot of questions about this because people want to know what recipes I use and all that stuff. Well, I hate to burst the bubble, but there’s no recipe.  There are no fancy recipes whatsoever. I eat super boring foods, but they’re foods that sustain me through the entire day.

So what I did is I went through all my cupboards, I got rid of the containers that are larger than eight ounces. So all I have left are small containers. They’re little, tiny cups, and they have a lid that goes on top of them, and I can fit all kinds of things in here. This is a screw-on lid, so it doesn’t leak.

So, I can put soup, vegetables, fruit, whatever I want in them.  The smaller portions are four-ounce size Glad containers with a snap on lid. Then I can put this inside a cooler inside my car and can carry my lunch.  So these are the two sizes that I use.

It’s Important to Keep Your Blood Sugar Up

Now, the important thing for me is to keep my blood sugar up during the day. So it’s an ongoing series of little, tiny meals, and I might eat six or seven of these tiny meals throughout the day.

Now, my lunch for today is green grapes. This is not exciting, nor are they super-duper delicious.  However they are going to taste good because they’re fresh grapes and they’re natural.

And what I like about this, this is a great snack or a great meal to take as a house cleaner, because this goes inside a cooler inside your car. You can eat this between houses that you’re cleaning, and because it doesn’t need to be refrigerated, it’s not going to go bad if it’s inside a cooler in your car.

Natural Snacks Will Last You All Day

And so one of the things that I like about the snacks that I bring to work is that they are natural foods, and so it’s not going to melt or go bad in the course of the day inside my car inside a cooler. So, I make lots of smoothies, and the smoothies that I make are made with small tubs of blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries.

And so if you live on a farm, and I grew up on a farm, we froze lots of our own fresh fruits and vegetables. It could be peaches, berries or whatever, and this is the size that I use that goes inside a blender cup with water, and I don’t mix it up with milk because milk does spoil.

And so instead of having flavored water, you get the benefits of having the berries inside, and it gives you a little bit of flavor, color, fun, and it’s exciting. Then I sip on that throughout the day. I will take a jug with me inside the customer’s house, right on the edge of my cleaning caddy.

I Keep Snacks in My Cleaning Caddy and Car

Usually, I put it inside my mop bucket so that I have it with me and it’s not mixed with my cleaning chemicals.  Then I will sip on that throughout the job so that it gives me a hit of natural energy, and keeps my blood sugar levels up throughout the job.

And so then when I get back to my car, I will have another snack. This one might be carrots, with no sauce to dip it in. I’m not real big on sauces or seasoning. So, I have grapes, carrots, and a smoothie that has berries in it.

I have a lovely smoothie that I’ve been drinking for years, it’s a spinach smoothie that has bananas in it. And I mix my flaxseed with that and my protein powder, and it does have a few more things in it, and that also keeps me going throughout the day. I might have two smoothies through the course of a day, I probably drink about six waters a day, and then lots of little, tiny meals.

I Cook a Lot of Whole Foods

Now, when I do the cooking at my house, it’s going to be a lot of whole foods. The whole foods, is one I took out of my freezer, like shredded cauliflower. There are no seasonings, it’s not cooked, it’s 100% raw, and we call it cauliflower rice.

But I literally take a whole head of cauliflower and I put it inside my food shredder and I shred it up, it grinds it up really fine, and then I put it inside the containers, and they go inside the freezer.

How I Store the Food in the Freezer

Now, the freezer, doesn’t do well with these little containers because they don’t stack well. If you get a whole freezer full of these, they’re going to topple over and they’re going to roll out. Then you open the door and they’re going to hit the ground, and if they’re frozen, it will burst the lid open.

So, what I do, and I’ve trained all my customers that also have something similar, we use these great big buckets. This bucket fits on the inside of a shelf inside your freezer, and now I have dozens of customers that use these buckets as well if you don’t have a drawer inside your freezer.

Now, inside the bucket, I have a gallon Ziploc bag, and this gallon Ziploc bag has 10 four ounce containers in it.

I Also Freeze Raw Avocados

I also freeze raw avocados, which I’m a real big fan of.  However, they don’t always get eaten on time. If you buy these at Costco, you get five or six in a bundle, and you may not eat them all at once.

You can mash them up and freeze them in a whole gallon Ziploc bag.  Now, this is great, this goes on top of your cauliflower rice.

It can go on top of a salad, you can just eat it raw, so it’s completely up to you, and this doesn’t require any cooking at all, and so a lot of the stuff that I put together is not necessarily cooked.

I Have a Color-Coding System for My Meals

And then I have a color-coding system for my meals.   I have four rolls of painter’s tape, which I put on the lids of my containers.

This means at a quick glance I can tell the yellow is for breakfast, the green is snacks, the red is for dinner, and then the blue is for lunch, so I can look at this really quick and see what I have prepared for myself for the day.

Everyone at My House Uses This System As Well

The cool thing about this particular system is everyone in my house uses it as well. So, they open the freezer, and see that there’s an entire bag that has red stickers on them, and they’re like, “Oh, this is my dinner“.

Or they’ll open up the fridge and they’ll see something like my grapes, and they’ll say, “Oh, this is my snack for the day.” 

So, it makes it easy for everyone in the house to pack their own breakfast, lunch, and dinner if they’re going to be gone throughout the course of the day.

My System Isn’t for Everyone

So, I love this system for me, but it’s not for everyone. This system works for me because I’m not going to spend a couple of hours a day in the kitchen.

I don’t have the time to give, I’m not interested in giving it and, it’s not where I want to spend my time. So by having my meals consolidated by one day a month, what I can do is I can prepare all of my food.

And if someone else in my house and this happens a lot, my husband will come in, he’ll say, “Are you hungry?” “Yes, I’m hungry,” and he’ll say, “Great,” so he’ll go in and he’ll put out a thing of cooked beans, and we put the beans in the four-ounce containers.

My System Isn’t Fancy but It’s Effective

So, it’s not fancy, but it’s super effective and super healthy. One of the things that I like best about this system is my husband and I used to eat a lot of junk food.

When we first got married, we ate a lot of junk food, and he was quite large, and he decided that for his own personal health, he wanted to lose weight.

And so we went on a diet if you will, and we decided that we would regulate what we ate. He lost 114 pounds, and he’s kept it off. So, as a process of that, we changed our relationship with food, and this is what we changed to.

Our Meal System is Simple and Easy

We changed to a system that was simple, that were more whole foods, and that was easy to fix. Because we found that like everyone else, we tend to gravitate towards what’s easy and already there.

So if your freezer is full of little meals, there’s more of a tendency for you to grab something and pop it in the microwave and eat it, or to grab an already prepackaged thing of grapes, for example, grab it and go.

It’s easier to do that than it is to make something healthy from scratch. Even we don’t do that, we don’t have that kind of time and energy.

I Always Have Ready Meals to Eat in the House

And so, we wanted to make sure that we always had things to eat in the house that was simple, that was already made. This is where the magic happens, that were already prepackaged for the size that we want to eat, because we find if we open like a bag of chips and we start eating, we’ll eat the whole bag.

There’s nothing to stop us and no one to stop us, and no one’s watching us, there’s no monitoring going on. So as long as it’s prepackaged in the right sizes, it’s easy to access and it’s ready to go.

And most of our food is precooked here, and the squashes, yams, beans and all that stuff, is easy to heat up in the microwave, and so preparing a meal takes like two minutes instead of taking 35 minutes or an hour.

My System is My Secret to Success

And so that is what we have done in our household because it has sustained us for the long haul. It has helped my husband keep off the weight, and so we both feel great, we both have the energy that we need throughout the day.

It gives us steady, sustained energy throughout the course of the day, and that is important to me with the schedule that I’m on right now.

I need sustained energy throughout the entire day, and I know that as a house cleaner, that has sustained me now for several years. So, it’s with the smoothies and the whole foods, and the smaller portions of food eaten regularly throughout the day, that is my secret to success.Resources

 

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