5 Reasons to Start Meal Planning Today|Helpful Guide to Avoid Fast Food

When you have a busy life, it can be difficult to eat healthily and stay on budget. It can certainly be easier to order take-out or to warm up pre-packaged meals, but in the long run, you are spending more money on food that isn’t healthy for you or your family.

As a working mother of 3, I found it stressful to figure out what to make for dinner after a long day of work. The meal had to be easy to prepare and eaten before we had to leave for their planned activities.

The meal also had to have ingredients that we could find in the kitchen. When there wasn’t a clear plan for meals, groceries were hard to buy. This made meals harder to prepare when there was no time for a quick run to the store.

Doing a weekly plan for our evening meals was a way that I could help us eat less fast food and still get to their events on time. As we started to plan the meals we saw more benefits than just the reduction in fast food.

Fewer trips to the Grocery Store

When we took the time to plan the meals, we were able to create a complete list of ingredients and add those items to our grocery list in time for the weekly shopping trip. When there are fewer trips to the store we are able to save money on gas and save time shopping.

Sales Helped the Budget Too

We got smart and looked for sales on foods that we could use in our meals. We would create a list of meal ideas based on sales found in the flyer.

Lately, we have found meat on sale for half price, or a buy-one-get-one deal. We use to take advantage of this and will stock the freezer for future weeks.

Shake Up the Menu

When the meals are planned you can see how to balance your family favorites around some new recipes. Meals were getting boring in our house before we started planning them. It was easier to make the same family favorites because I didn’t have to learn a new recipe.

There is nothing wrong with family favorites. However, when you don’t enjoy making the meal it makes it hard to enjoy eating that meal. This creates a bad eating cycle, where I will snack more at night if I wasn’t satisfied at dinner. My taste buds need to be satisfied for my brain to say, “I don’t need to eat anything else tonight”.

Kid-Approved (most of the time)

We took the next step with the meal planning so that the kids would feel involved. Meal planning became a family task so that the kids had their say in what we were going to make. This way they could have a say by adding in their favorites.

When you have a picky eater, like my son, it was easier to include him. We had a better chance of his buy-in prior to the meal and fewer fights at meal time when we started meal planning. He didn’t always get his way, but at least he had a few days to prepare himself for the meal.

Teamwork

When schedules were especially busy, a planned meal was always easier to delegate to other family members in a pinch. For slow cooker meals, my husband could prepare them before heading to work and I would do the final preparations when I got home from work.

When I was delayed at work or by traffic, having a meal plan helped reduce stress. The kids will know what meal was planned so I was able to ask them to help start preparations. There were even times where the older kids made the meal and got their siblings ready to leave for their activities.

We went months without eating at a fast food restaurant because we were eating at home. Being able to plan the meals improved our healthy eating, and eliminated the stress of figuring out what to feed the kids in a pinch.

We weren’t wasting time trying to decide what to make and then rushing to the store only to find that we only had time to warm up a frozen dinner. In the end, spending a bit of time planning out the week’s meals helped simplify our life, giving us more time to connect as a family over the kitchen table.