How To: Meal Planning

Deciding what to make for dinner can be difficult in and of itself. But trying to lose weight and deciding at the last minute what to make your family for dinner can be a nightmare! That’s why we have a solution for you: meal planning.

Knowing ahead of time what you are going to prepare for meals can save you time and money, and most importantly, it allows you to stick to your diet and continue losing weight. Meal planning helps you solve the age old question: “What’s for dinner?” It also prevents ordering take-out, which is often high in carbs and fats. If you have never meal planned before, it can seem a bit overwhelming at first. Try sticking to it for a month, and hopefully you will grow to love it!

First, decide what day works best for you to go to the grocery store, and save some time to plan your meals beforehand. Go through your recipe books or online cooking websites and pick out enough dinner recipes to get you through the week. You can either assign a meal to each night, or you can just have seven meals on hand and decide each morning which one to make that evening.

Once you have your seven recipes picked out, check your freezer and pantry for any ingredients you already have on hand. Make a grocery list for everything else you will need. In addition, think about any breakfast, lunch, and healthy snack items you and your family will want during the week. One of the goals of meal planning is to save time by only going to the grocery store once a week.

Finally, when you have been to the grocery store and have the food you need for the week, you can relax knowing that you don’t have to decide what’s for dinner at 5:00. You won’t have to run to the store to pick up that one ingredient you are missing either because you will have already gone through each recipe and have what you need!

Here are some tips we have found to come in handy while meal planning:

• If you don’t have time each week to plan out meals, pick a day at the beginning of each month, and come up with a list of meals to pull from. Each week, pick seven recipes, and shop for the needed ingredients in those meals.
• Make freezer meals. There are some great cookbooks out there that adjust recipes into freezer meals. Invest in one of these, and each month make a batch of 10 meals to freeze. On busy nights, you can pull out a meal and quickly heat it up.
• Write down your meals, along with where you found the recipe, and keep the list on your fridge. The last thing you want to have happen is to go to make dinner and be looking through all your cookbooks trying to find the recipe you need.
• Have your family go through recipes with you. When the kids help pick the meals, they are sure to eat them!

As always, take the concept of meal planning, and make it work for you and your family. If you don’t think the method we explained will work for you, alter it so it will! Meal planning is such an important concept when trying to lose weight, and it will help you in so many ways. Let us know if you already meal plan and have any tips to add!