The secret to healthy meals…
This past weekend I got distracted with the sunshine and didn’t do my meal planning for the week and I really feel the difference ….and it’s only Tuesday. Planning meals ahead isn’t the most exciting activity to do but once its done it allows me more time to do exciting things as it frees up lots of time in the long-run. You know how it is… looking in the fridge wondering what you can quickly put together, looking the in cupboards, back to the fridge again…. When you have meals planned, you avoid all that. Knowing what meals I am going to have most days and having the right ingredients makes life so much easier. No matter what busyness is going on during the day, when I come home, I find it so much easier to have a look at the planner and start prepping the meal for the day.
Taking the time at the weekend to plan for the following week will help you in the following ways:
- Save you time when food shopping as you have a list prepared
- Save you money as you shop just for what you need for the week (some people estimate you can halve your food bill this way!)
- Preparing as you can start prepping the night before for tomorrows meal’s
- Saves time in the kitchen as you know in advance what you will be cooking each day, no wasting time looking through the fridge to see what you can pull together!
- Allows you to see where you can ‘double-up’ so that left overs of one meal could be used in another
- Engaging your family in the decisions around what’s for dinner, great for getting kids involved and giving them choice
- Allocating who is responsible for cooking each meal – saves a lot of potential stress as you know who is doing what and when!
- Improve your health as your have taken the time to choose healthy meals in advance
- Less food waste so better for the environment
Meal planning is the one tool that I have found to be invaluable – the weeks I use the planner it saves so much time, effort and stress and turns preparing meals into a joy rather than a ‘must do’.
You can download my Free Planner in the resources section of my website.
Allow yourself some flexibility with it, especially in the first few weeks of trying it. Even now we always allow a flexi day (usually Fridays) where we just go with the flow.
I encourage you to give it a go – it really is worth the effort as it reaps so many rewards!