Have you ever found yourself wandering around the supermarket or scrolling the offerings online and not knowing what to buy so you just pick whatever looks good?
The overwhelm of trying to stick within budget, cater for everyone’s tastes, buy ‘good’ food, and trying not to buy the same thing all the tie is enough to make anyone go crazy. No wonder food boxes are so popular!
The goods news is, there is a way out. And it doesn’t involve cooking a whole lot of food that you’ve never heard of before, let alone eaten!
The biggest thing I discovered about meal planning is that it uses a completely different part of the brain than when you are deciding what to eat. Eating is an EMOTIONAL process; you have to FEEL like eating it at the time. But meal planning is an act of organisation. You do it before you even think about eating so you don’t have to think about it at the time.
Our creative/emotional brains are different to our analytic/organisational brains. So there’s a continual ‘mismatch’ internally whenever we go to do a meal plan.
This is the reason why it’s so important to have some strategies in place when you’re meal planning to make sure you’ll be successful.
I’ve listed my top 5 tips below to help you get started:
Now that my kids are older, we have after school activities nearly every day. When we get home it’s straight into baths/showers, dinner prep and wind down for the night.
But the most useful part of these activities is that they are the same every week. I know what our daily schedule will be from week to week and I don’t need to think about it.
One of the things my family has learnt is that not everyone like the same foods, and we are to be respectful of that.
That means not everyone likes every meal I make. And that’s ok.
I make sure to include each family member‘s favourites in each meal plan so they all have something to look forward to, and everyone else has the chance to practise being respectful of other peoples’ tastes.
This is one of the best things you can have available when starting to consistently meal plan.
No matter how good our intentions are, there are always going to be times where life just doesn’t go the way you plan and you don’t manage to get a meal plan in place.
A No-Thinking Meal Plan will give you a week of meals you can cook off the top of your head with ingredients you have readily available in your home. You might do 1 or 2 while life puts itself back together or you might use them all.
When you first start meal planning, you might feel like you don’t have a very exciting selection of meal ideas to choose from. However, once you get into the routine of getting meal plans in place, you’ll probably find you have the headspace to add in something new.
And slowly, over time, you’ll find you’ll add more and more recipes and meal ideas to your selection and putting a meal plan together will be something you look forward to.
You might also repeat previous meal plans, so you don’t get rid of them! Store them somewhere safe so you can just whip one out at the last second that you really enjoyed and use that!
Like anything, meal planning takes practise.
When I started, I was planning for just one week at a time, and I had hardly any recipes to choose from. Now, I plan for 3 months at a time, I shop monthly, and I have hundreds of recipes.
I have also started growing my own food and am learning how my meal planning will change again to match that.
I’ve broken the progressions down in to 5 easy stages so you can easily see where on the Meal Planning Journey you fit. You can grab a copy of it here.
Meal Planning has helped me become a CREATOR of my life instead of just a CONSUMER. Make sure to follow me on my page, Siobhan Mundy, #filledtooverflowing to find out more about how I hold my happiness in my own hands!
Happy Meal Planning!