I admit it: I suck at meal planning. Which is too bad, because it's helpful in several ways.
- Helps you eat healthy foods.
- Helps you eat reasonable food quantities/portions.
- Saves you money.
- Saves you time.
What is meal planning? For our purposes, it means planning what foods you're going to eat at some future meals. And this comes in three parts:
- Deciding on menus; i.e., what you're going to eat.
- Acquiring the food you'll need; i.e., shopping.
- Preparing meals to eat later (optional, but handy).
Let's look at each of these in more detail.
Menus
Knowing ahead of time what we're going to be eating makes it much easier to avoid making unhealthy choices later. You want to be as detailed as possible, including all ingredients and determining portion sizes for all the meals for the time period you're planning. You might be using fancy recipes here, or very simple "recipes" (like cottage cheese with grapes). Collect the recipes (or "recipes") that work best for you so you can re-use them in future plans. The outputs from this step are the menu plan (i.e., what you'll be eating and when) and the shopping list for ingredients you don't already have.
Shopping
Once you know what you'll be eating, you can get the ingredients you need to prepare your meals using the shopping list you prepared in the previous step. This can save time and money as you get food for multiple meals all in one trip. It's also an excellent way to help avoid impulse buying of unhealthy foods since you will have a complete list of all the foods you need to buy. That won't prevent impulse buying, but it should make it harder. When this step is complete, you should have all the food you need for the meals you are planning.*
Preparation
While this step is optional, it can come in very handy. The idea is to make meals (or parts of them) to eat later. For example, you might grill a bunch of chicken to use in different ways: as a main dinner course, or in a salad, for example. Or chop up vegetables you'll be having for snacks or in meals. Preparation can be a real game-changer in your diet, making it much easier to have healthy meals especially during busy times.
Meal planning may not seem easy for some people (like me!), but it's a great way to eat healthier. It's time to try it!
* There may be times when you don't get all the ingredients in advance. You might want to get some ingredients fresh on the day you'll be eating (perhaps even from your garden). But don't use this as an excuse to skip the shopping step!