Meal Plans: Plan your way to a Healthier Diet

Healthy Food and Healthy Living

Developing an effective meal plan is essential if you hope to lose weight and enjoy a healthier lifestyle. Serious athletes follow strictly controlled meal plans; overweight people follow their urges from moment to moment. Whether you need to lose weight or want to win back some of your valuable time, preparing your family meals according to a meal plan will transform your life.

The Struggle to Lose Weight

For those people that struggle with losing weight, it seems that food is constantly on the mind. Having a meal plan can help avoid impulsive eating. If you know in the morning what you are going to have for breakfast lunch and dinner, you can put the thoughts of food out of your mind. Also by having the meal plans in place you will know the number of calories that you have planned for the day. This will help you decide if you have calories left over for snacks between the planned meals.

The Shopping Plan

Meal plans made in advance will make grocery shopping easier, period. Here’s a step by step approach to get you started:

1. Take a few minutes to write down a typical list of your family’s meals for the whole week, day by day.
2. Draw up a list of ingredients you’ll need. To do this, divide your list into fresh food on the one hand and dry or frozen goods on the other. This is your weekly overview.
3. Check what you already have in your kitchen and make a separate list of all the ingredients that you need to fulfil your meal plan. This is your week’s shopping list.

By spending a few minutes preparing meal plans you can get everything you need for the week in one trip to the grocery store.

What Will You Save?

The fewer trips you make to the grocery store, the less time and money you will spend. Let’s take a look at what happens when you nip round to the grocery store to pick up that couple of essential items:

1. At least a couple more items seem to find their way into your shopping trolley cart, especially if you are hungry when you get there.

2. You have to face more temptations to cheat on your diet – remember this is what your grocery store is designed to do. This is especially true if you are entering the grocery store when you are hungry.

3. If you are forced to use a convenience store to pick up something that you forgot in your meal plan, you’ll end up paying up to three times more than you would in the grocery store.

4. Cutting down the number of shopping trips will save you gas and wear and tear on your car – trips that are so short the engine doesn’t get chance to warm up are hard on your car’s engine and fuel consumption.

These points might seem obvious, but they are hard to implement unless they are part of an overall meal plan that you can focus on.

What Will You Lose?

There are three things you stand to lose from implementing your meal plan:

1. Weight
2. Bad eating habits
3. Stress

To make an effective plan, you have to have a goal. Focus on this goal and you will inevitably achieve a healthier lifestyle and a slimmer figure - unless your goal is to expand until you fill a 3-person sofa. Remember, those who never quit, never lose (except for smokers and drug addicts, of course).

Extend your Plan to Embrace the Whole Family.

The best meal plans are simple to develop with input from the whole family. Including an item that your spouse can’t live without could lead to him/her assuming responsibility for preparing that meal. In this way, each family member will get to prepare the food they most enjoy, as long as your children are old enough (or that you have any children). If you can engage the whole family at the planning stage, delegating each meal or cooking task could be built into your meal plans. This will leave you with fewer meals to prepare yourself, enabling you to focus on looking for recipe inspiration and helping you stay on track if you are following a diet.