Eat Smart: A Beginner’s Guide to Meal Planning

Meal planning is a fantastic way to save both time and money week to week.  With life being so busy nowadays, cooking every night seems far from ideal, but constantly ordering take out and fast food is both unhealthy and can add up quickly.  Setting aside some of a day to meal prep is a perfect solution, but it can be a bit overwhelming for a newbie.  Don’t worry though, as here’s a step by step guide to help you get meal planning in no time:

#1: Figure Out Your Dietary Needs, or Wants

The first step is the probably the hardest step, but it’s the most important.  If you’re trying to plan out meals, you need to understand what your body needs, and maybe what your body doesn’t like, too.  Also, you need to ask yourself why you’re doing this–is this only a money and time saving measure, or are you trying to lose weight?  Gain muscle?  Maybe an attempt to stick to dietary restrictions?  Once you can clearly answer why you want to begin meal planning, you can actually begin to plan.

#2: Find Some Recipes You Want to Make (and are within your skill level)

Another difficult step for some, if you’re new at cooking.  It’s very important to know what you need to cook when you’re meal prepping, and unless you’re really good at making up meals in your head, the best way to do that is by amassing a bunch of recipes.  Try to find things that sound fun or tasty to make, but also try to make sure you’re not overstepping your skill level.  Of course, cooking is the type of skill you’ll only get better at by doing it, but it’s not the best idea to try to make a soufflé if you’ve only boiled pasta before.  An example for me, I have trouble with recipes that require too many odd ingredients, as I’ll probably only use them with the recipe I’m looking at or a few others, so not only am I unfamiliar with the stuff, but it feel almost like a waste of money.  I tend to stick to recipes with less overall ingredients, as I am less likely to forget or mess up something along the way.

#3: Actually Plan the Meals

An easy step to forget in the hustle and bustle of everything, and easily the one I mess up most often.  When meal planning, looking up recipes, and making grocery lists, make sure you’ve actually planned enough meals to last your prepping timeframe (typically a week for most, some prep twice a week though).  If you don’t have enough to cover you for all your meals and all your days, then you’re going to left desperately looking for something to eat on those empty days… and that can do a number on your wallet and your diet plan!

That said, it’s always a good idea to prepare for the worst.  If say, you burned a meal or something went bad earlier than expected, it can be quite helpful to have a few ’emergency meals’ on hand to help bridge the gap.  Ideally, this would be something you cooked well in advance and froze some portions of, but additionally things like frozen dinners (provided they pass the dietary test!) and protein bars can help with meal failures.

#4: Make A Grocery List

We’ve all done it at least once, right?  “Oh, I only need a few items, I don’t need to make a list.”  Then you go to the grocery store, and come out with twenty things you didn’t need, and only half of the stuff you did need.  If you want to save money and be efficient at meal planning, you really have to make a grocery list to keep yourself on track and get only what you need.  Not only does it help with you not buying unnecessary stuff (if you buy spinach 50% off but it goes bad before you use it, that doesn’t save any money), but also makes sure you don’t buy an item you already have some off (assuming you check your pantry before making the list).  Wasting money on stuff you don’t actually is, obviously, a huge money waster after all!

#5: Set Aside Time to Cook

The last step, but the one you’ve been preparing for… time to actually cook and prepare the meals!  For all its time saving during the week, meal prepping can be a bit time consuming on the day of prepping itself.  Depending on how many recipes you’re making, it could take multiple hours.  Of course, that depends on how and what equipment is needed to cook the food.  A slow cooker cooks food in six to eight hours, but having something in the slow cooker frees the oven and stovetop up for other recipes, and a slow cooker is very much ‘set it and go’ in terms of cooking.  If you properly manage your kitchen space and recipe times (which will take practice, of course), you can cut down on prep time drastically.

Do you meal prep?  What are your tips and tricks?  Let us know in the comments!

Related Posts

• 

  Spice Up Your Life with These Fantastic Salt and Pepper Shakers
  Spice Up Your Life with These Fantastic Salt and Pepper Shakers
• 

  Eat, Drink, and Bill Murray: The 11 Best Bill Murray Products
  Eat, Drink, and Bill Murray: The 11 Best Bill Murray Products
• 

  10 Awesome Tech Upgrades for Apartment Dwellers
  10 Awesome Tech Upgrades for Apartment Dwellers
• 

  Deep Fried Gadgets, What’s Not to Like?
  Deep Fried Gadgets, What’s Not to Like?