Meal Planning

There are days where I feel like everywhere I look, I see posts and pins about meal planning and meal prep. So the question always come down to - does it work? What is the point of meal planning and meal prep? Which one is best for you?

To be honest I’ve been trying to meal plan each week for almost two years. It was always hit or miss whether or not we even stuck to it until very recently. My original method (which didn’t fully work for me and I will explain why) was using a little dry erase board on my fridge with Sunday through Saturday. Now I use a meal planning book.

Why do I meal plan?

This is a great question! When I don’t meal plan for our family, I find we eat out a lot. We eat quick meals, not always bad food but also not the healthiest. We buy groceries we don’t use and then throw out food that is going bad way too often. So, I try to meal plan for 5-6 meals a week. Depending on the week and the meals planned, I often leave a night for leftovers or a night open for eating out or whatever we are in the mood for.

I do meal plan but I don’t do a week of meal prep on the weekend. For our house I feel like we don’t use the same ingredients enough during the week for me to do a large meal prep day. However with 2 little kids in the house, trying to get everything ready for dinner at dinner time is often a nightmare! What I have started doing is meal prep during the day for that evening's dinner. Ideally it is during nap/quiet time but sometimes it has to happen in stages because my children don’t believe in sleep! I do however do meal prep for snacks now. By the time little man lets me know he is hungry we are usually in HANGRY mode!!! I am tired of feeding him processed/convenient snacks to the point where he no longer wants a nourishing meal. My 3 year old is the same - by the time she is done with her snack, she is no longer hungry for dinner. However at her age it is hard for me to say “no, you must stay hungry” until dinner. So I have started making sure we have fruit and veggies washed and chopped in the fridge. I also cook up ground turkey and chicken as a snack for them. Anything that I can find that is easy, convenient and healthy.

My Old Method versus My New Method

The dry erase board. The idea of this is great! It’s small, on my fridge, reusable and easy to change. However I would almost always forget ingredients for a recipe when I was grocery shopping. I was also really bad about being specific on which recipe I was cooking when I plan the week. I would just put down that we are having chicken, and when we did the grocery shopping, I would pick up things I figured we would use for vegetables, etc., not what we had actually planned out.

I was using my dry erase board method for over a year. Then I had a wonderful enlightening conversation with a friend of mine. And she introduced me to the method she uses for meal planning. We switched over to this method about 3 months ago and I’m still in love with it. I ordered a meal planning book off of Etsy from Carrie Ellis. (I am in no way affiliated with this Etsy shop but I love it too much not to share). This meal planning book has a month overview and then a week by week planner. On the right side of the page there is a perforated list for your groceries. The reason I love this so much is I plan my meals for the week with my cookbooks right there so I can also make my grocery list making sure I don’t forget any ingredients. I keep the meal plan for the week in the book so I can look back for idea’s or see what we have been eating each week. You can get this amazing meal planning book here.

The other thing I did so we weren’t constantly eating the same thing was going through all of my cookbooks. I took one or two evenings and went through each cookbook and made a list of recipes I wanted to try on a post-it note. On the post-it, I put the name of the recipe and the page number. Then I stuck the note on the front cover of that book. Now when I am planning out my meals each week I pull out my cookbooks so we can try new things.

If you are struggling with constantly just grabbing whatever you can for dinner or not sticking to what you want for a meal plan, it’s time to change up what you are doing. Look at the different meal planning methods and find one that works for you.

Whichever food prep and meal planning you choose, find the one that works for you. If the method works for your friend, neighbor, or even trainer, but doesn’t work for you, then you are setting yourself up for failure. When people plan their meals and have the ingredients in the house ready to use, they are more likely to stick with the plan. This means less cheat nights and sticking to a better 80/20 clean eating diet.