How to Eat Healthy with Meal Planning
Studies have proven that if you eat home cooked meals 5 days in a week you can extend your life span by 10 years, what better way to embrace healthy and clean eating than meal planning.
There are definitely days when it’s difficult to cook, we all have our lazy days and that’s totally okay but when this happens often it becomes a cause of concern, which is why I have written this article to educate you on meal planning and ways it can make healthy or clean eating easier for you.
Meal planning is the preparation and planning of meals before hand, it not only saves you time it also goes a long way to save you money and the stress that goes into cooking daily, with meal planning you can plan your diet ahead of the week, you can choose to meal plan once a week or twice a week.
Meal planning does not mean cooking everyday or getting stuck at eating same meals every day, a proper meal plan must be healthy, sufficient, nutritious and has to contain varieties of foods that we can get our nutrients from, the first three steps to take when starting out to meal plan for the first time are listed below.
CHOOSE YOUR MEALS
Figure out what your meals would look like, for healthy eating it should contain lots of Vegetables, fruits, fish, and less carbohydrate.
Picking out your diet can be a bit tricky so try to settle down and visit your favorite recipe blog or Pinterest profiles to help you decide what to include and exclude from your meal plan, it is also advisable to work with the foods in season and plan your meals around them as this will help reduce a lot cost so feel free to visit the farmers market if you have one nearby.
PLAN YOUR MEALS
After you have your meals picked out the next thing to do is to plan, if you are new to this consider using a meal planning template or a list to write down all the things you know you can make with what you have available, a dated and flexible meal plan is highly recommended as this will help you keep looking back at the past month and be able to plan a new month from the meals you liked in the past month.
You don’t have to do it all at once, sometimes I plan my meals weekly and it works well for me, if you are using a template that has been dated for 30 days that’s perfect too.
PREPARE YOUR MEALS
Meal preparation is time consuming so I highly recommend prepping your meals during the weekend, make a batch weekly for all your needs or twice monthly in larger quantities if you have a means of storage, bulk cooking is highly important this way you can prepare ingredients like tomatoes in bulk and store them for when it’s not in season, try freezer meals, crock pot meals and pressure cooker meals.
Healthy eating is about finding balance with works for you and what doesn’t and meal planning helps you do that more consistently, I hope you find this really helpful in starting your journey with meal planning.
I try and try, but I need lots of help! lol
This is great. I have attempted meal planning in the past, but I am just not that organized, so this is perfect for me. Thank you 🙂
My pleasure!
This planning can be quite challenging for some, but definitely worth it in the long run. Setting realistic goals, being consistent is crucial.
I have a hard time with meal planning this guidance is helpful.
Great tips. i agree – once I started meal planning, i found that I was able to experiment more with new recipes!
Meal planning would be so much easier if my husband wasn’t so picky and I hate having to make 2 different meals, I would love to eat better and healthier but hubby hates everything and is a meat and potato man
That makes it more difficult!
I have to get back into meal planning, it seems i go good for a couple of weeks and then it falls apart.
Getting back is good too!
I learned something here.
I’m on a roll, last night I prepped base salads for a week, can changed these daily by what additional item I add. Today I added chickpeas.
That’s great!