How Meal Planning Can Make Your Life Easier

Meal planning helps improve diet quality while also saving you time and money along the way! Many of us know this but meal planning continues to be overwhelming. What if you knew that it would make your life easier? Would that motivate you to give it a try? As we head into the school year nights will get hectic with sports, school activities, homework, volunteer commitments, work obligations and more. This is a perfect time to get into the habit of meal planning. We all want more time with our family, less stress in the kitchen, and just more time, in general, during the week. Planning ahead can free up mental space and time that then relieves stress. Although meal planning looks different for everybody, the article below discusses tips and tricks that are useful no matter where you are on your meal planning journey. To be clear, meal planning is not meal prepping. We are talking about planning your meals for each night of the week. We will include some tips on prepping as well, but the goal of this article is for you to get meal planning down.

1.                  Start Small

Begin by planning just a few meals or snacks for the week ahead. Make sure to include date night or even a takeout night. The goal is to look at your family’s calendar and decide ahead of time. You can slowly build upon your plan by adding in more meals. If you always get stumped when planning meals, assign weekly “theme nights” to cut down on mental wheel spinning such as the popular, Taco Tuesday. You can also check websites, cookbooks, magazines, and social media for additional meal inspiration. Here are a few of our favorites: Skinny Taste, Cookie and Kate, The Defined Dish, and Pinch of Yum. If you live with other people, ask them to choose a recipe and cook one night during the week. This works great with children. If they choose the menu and help in part of the preparation, they are more likely to eat the meal. Pro Tip: A good day to do this is Thursday or Friday so you have time to shop over the weekend for the food you will need for the week ahead!

2.                  Balance Your Plate

Whether you are planning meals for a week, month, or just a few days, it is important to make sure each food group is represented in your plan. Whole grains, lean protein, healthy fats, fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy. A popular style of meal planning is to prepare individual items instead of the whole meal to help increase variety. It is easier to balance your plate by allowing you to check off each food group separately. For example, quinoa and rice for whole grains, chicken and ground turkey for lean protein, avocado and walnuts for healthy fat, mangos and apples for fruit, spring mix and lettuce for vegetables, and Greek yogurt and goat cheese for low-fat dairy. Out of these ingredients you can make a taco bowl using the rice, ground turkey, avocado, mangos, lettuce, and Greek yogurt or a harvest grain bowl using the quinoa, chicken, walnuts, apples, spring mix, and goat cheese. You can also use these same ingredients to make other meals like Greek bowls and a side salad using rice, chicken, avocado, spring mix, goat cheese, and mangos and more!

3.                  Keep a Well-Stocked Pantry

Maintaining pantry staples is a great way to streamline your meal planning process and simplify menu creation. Here are a few examples of healthy and versatile foods to keep in your pantry:

·       Whole grains: brown rice, quinoa, oats, bulgur, whole-wheat pasta

·       Legumes: low sodium canned or dried black beans, garbanzo beans, pinto beans, lentils

·       Other canned goods: low-sodium broth, tomatoes, tomato sauce, artichokes, olives, corn, tuna, salmon, chicken

·       Oils: olive, avocado oils and cooking spray

·       Baking essentials: baking powder, baking soda, flour, cornstarch

·       Other: nut butter, sweet potatoes, mixed nuts

4.                  Shop Your Pantry First

Before you plan your meals for the week, take inventory of what you already have on hand. Shop from your pantry, freezer, and refrigerator first and note the specific foods you want or need to use up. This helps you move through the food you already have, reduces waste, and prevents you from unnecessarily buying the same things. A good place to start is checking your produce drawer to determine what is about to go bad and incorporate those items into side dishes, salads, or other recipes. Check your pantry for dry goods that are close to their expiration date like lentils for soup or canned tomatoes for marinara sauce. Pro Tip: freezing foods that are about to expire like pesto, tomato sauce, hummus, guacamole, and herbs in ice cube trays makes them easier to defrost in the future!

5.                  Wash and Prepare Produce Right Away

To help you and your family eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, wash and prepare them as soon as you get home from the grocery store. If you open your refrigerator to find a cut up fruit or carrot and celery sticks ready for snacking, you are more likely to reach for those items when you are hungry. Also, do not forget to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables to provide your body with a wider variety of vitamins and minerals. Pro Tip: place the cut-up fruits and vegetables at eye level in the refrigerator to encourage consumption instead of hiding them in produce drawers where produce goes to die. Also, go to the refrigerator for a snack before going to the pantry.

6.                  Consistently Make Time

Meal planning must be a priority for it to work! However, it is worth the extra planning to save you time during the week and provide healthier meals for you and your family. We have many testimonies from families who started meal planning and it actually REDUCED their stress. It can help to regularly carve out a block of time that is solely dedicated to planning. For some people, crafting a meal plan can take as little as 10-15 minutes per week. If your plan also includes preparing some food items ahead of time or pre-portioning meals and snacks, you may need a few hours. Pro Tip: spread the work out by planning on Thursday, grocery shopping on Friday or Saturday then spend about one hour preparing everything on Sunday.

7.                  Prepare Smarter, Not Harder

If you are not great at chopping vegetables or do not have time to batch cook and pre-portion your meals, there are likely some healthy, prepared options at your local grocery store. Pre-cut fruits and vegetables or prepared meals are usually more expensive, but if the convenience factor is what it takes to reduce stress in your life or get you to eat more vegetables, it may be well worth it. Pro Tip: if you do not want to eat pre-made meals then figure out which days are the busiest and plan to do simple sheet pan or crock pot meals for those days.

In conclusion, the more convenient and fun meal planning is, the more likely you are to consistently do it. A helpful tip when meal planning is to reuse the same foods in different recipes so that you are not buying 40 different items at the grocery store. An easy way to do this is by shopping for 3 recipes each week with one of them being familiar to you and another one being a freezer recipe for convenience. An example of a freezer recipe is frozen cauliflower rice stir fry with a protein added to it like eggs, meatballs, or a burger. We hope you find meal planning less stressful this year.