4 KEY BENEFITS OF MEAL PLANNING
People who plan, achieve.
This is true for finances. This is true for career advancement. This is true for health & wellness, and is no exception when it comes to meal planning.
Meal planning is one of the best ways to set yourself up for success nutritionally. With a meal plan, you can save time, add value, eat healthier, and minimize food waste, to name just a few benefits.
1. Weekly Meal Planning: The Ultimate Time Saver
By planning your meals ahead of time, you can make accommodations for your schedule – if you are busy you can focus on quick and simple recipes, and if your schedule is lighter you can incorporate some more involved options.
With a meal plan, you eliminate uncertainty and confusion as to who wants what, because you already know what you are having! Especially with dinnertime, when decision fatigue from the day has set in, your time spent trying to figure something out will be saved and you can focus on preparing and enjoying what you had planned for. This is especially helpful for larger families who sometimes have different ideas about what they want to eat, and for busy families who might be in a rush between activities and need to grab and go as they come through.
As meal planning becomes a habit, the faster the process goes. Bonus: once your plan is written, grocery shopping is so much more streamlined! It takes me less than 15 minutes to meal plan and grocery shop (online) each week.
2. Add Value (In More Ways Than One) With Weekly Meal Planning
By only shopping for what you need, you can eliminate spending on foods not aligned with your goals, like endcap promotions or checkout line goodies that you don’t really want or need. In addition, when you plan your meals based on your health goals, you add nutritional value by creating a plan around that instead of just picking up whatever you might see at the store.
How many times have you added something to your cart only to wonder later why you bought it? Those purchases add up in cost and calories! Plus if you are focused on cooking and eating at home, you will be surprised how much money you will save on delivery fees, restaurant tips and other charges that add up over time
3. Eat Healthier By Planning Meals Ahead
One of the best tips I share with my clients who want to eat healthier is for them to plan ahead! Having a plan takes any in-the-moment, emotional decision-making out of the process, eliminates inconsistencies in what you want versus what you have, and creates a framework for nutritional success!
By writing a meal plan and sticking to it, you take the spur-of-the-moment emotions out of the equation! A solid plan can keep you out of the drive-through, away from food delivery, and help eliminate skipping meals when you feel too busy. Focusing on fresh produce and lean proteins for 80 percent or more of your money will add up to nutrient-dense, pocketbook-light planning!
4. Minimize Food Waste With A Meal Plan
When you menu plan you can shop for only what you need, versus adding things to your cart that might look or sound good in the moment. When you just buy what you need, you use what you have on hand and yield maximum value and use from each item, versus buying things that you *might* want and then having them go bad, expire, or throwing them away because you decide you didn’t actually want whatever it was you purchased on a whim.
There is no right or wrong way to meal plan. Some people like to plan a week at a time, others just two to three days at a time. I know some people that plan the night before for the next day. The best strategy is the one that will work best for you! It might take a couple of tries to get in a rhythm and determine what works best for you, but once you do it is a total game changer!
Here Are A Few Extra Meal Planning Tips to Get You Started:
🍥 Be sure to inventory what you already have on hand and use those ingredients first. This will help you to minimize spend and get maximum value from your current kitchen. It will also inspire some ideas for dishes you can create based on what you already have.
🍥 Plan your meals for each day starting with the staples you have daily – coffee in the morning, morning snack, afternoon snack. Then factor in any lunch or dinner appointments that you won’t need to plan for. From there, plan dinners which will help you determine what leftovers you will have for lunches, and/or which items can be stretched across two nights with different preparations. The last step is to fill in any remaining meal slots.
🍥 As you make the menu plan, keep a running list of ingredients to shop for so that as soon as the menu plan is done you can open your grocery app, add those to cart and then pick everything up once they are ready.
🍥 Pro tip: to make meal planning even more efficient, keep a list of your favorite go to meals and mix in one to three new recipes each week. This ensures you are always trying new flavors and textures while being able to rely on your tried and true recipes for busy times.
The bottom line is this: If you are looking to achieve health & wellness goals, menu planning will set you up for success!
If you need a template to follow, there are a ton of options online – or reach out to me here. I would love to help you design a structure and plan that works best for you! And if you want extra inspiration, make sure to follow me on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIN.
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