Whether you love cooking or not, it’s time consuming. Sometimes I get so tired of trying to think of what to cook for my family of four! The result is that we end up eating the same rotation of dishes from week to week. Ugh. The best solution I’ve found is meal planning.
Regular meal planning takes commitment up front. You need to actually think about how often you’ll enjoy eating certain dishes. But once you’ve done it, you can sail more smoothly through the months knowing what’s in store. If you decide to take a break, it’s always easy to pick it up again at any time.
Reasons to Do Meal Planning:
1. You will probably eat in a healthier way.
It’s much easier to resist the tub of ice cream or the junky frozen meal when you have a meal plan in place. It doesn’t mean that the plan has to exclude fun treats. But at least you’re making a conscious decision, rather than an impulse buy you might later regret.
2. You can save money.
By planning your meals, you can also plan your food budget. You can go shopping at the supermarket with a list in hand, and you know that anything else in the cart falls outside of it. Over time you’ll form a meal planning habit and will be tempted to put fewer extra things in.
3. You’ll stress less.
As a Mom, I find that cooking often becomes stressful simply because I get tired of cooking the same things over and over out of desperation. I love cooking I just don’t love when it feels monotonous. By having a meal plan, you won’t reach this point because you’ll build variety in beforehand.
4.You’ll waste less food.
Without a plan, it’s way too easy to stock the fridge full of food then watch as some of it goes bad. This happens to me in the grocery store when I add ingredients because they look interesting, but I don’t know how to cook with them. Or sometimes I just buy too much of something and we don’t eat it fast enough. The meal planning definitely reduces this.
