Meal Planning 101

Here’s what happens when you don’t use meal planning. Have you ever come through the door after a long day of work or other commitments and realize you don’t have any food in the fridge to make a meal?  Or you forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer to defrost for your meal today. Or that lovely broccoli you bought a week ago you today it’s shriveled up in the back of the vegetable crisper?

You may think that meal planning is one of those things only super organized people do. My response is no, super-organized people may have an excel spread sheet to inventory their foods but meal planning can be as simple as using a pen and paper.

Maybe you’re thinking, this nutritionist is crazy, I’m so busy I don’t have the time to add one more thing to my plate. My response, that’s exactly why you need to plan your meals. In the long term, meal planning will ultimately save you time (and money).

A downstream effect of planning meals, even just the dinner meal, is less stress. Who doesn’t want that?

The behavioral researcher Brian Wansink, Ph. D., suggest we have over 200 food-type decisions to make every day. From milk or cream in our coffee to deciding if we go with the Asian Chicken or Cobb salad. Each time we eat, our brains go through a series of decisions. Add this to the multitude of other daily decisions and it’s easy for us to experience decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue, likes to hit later in the day, along with willpower, which results in less than stellar food decisions after 5pm. Imagine what it would be like to walk into your home knowing exactly what you’ll be preparing and eating tonight? Wouldn’t that smooth the transition from the outside world to the comfort of your home?

Meal Planning and Body Weight

As a Nutritionist for over 35 years I’ve seen that women are busier than ever and there’s no letting up on their schedules. They no longer have the time or inclination to stop on the way home to pick up ingredients and whip up a 3 course meal after a long day of work and commuting.

When people get busy they often put eating on the bottom of the list. When their hormones finally have had enough and send the messages “feed me now” people rush with their food choices and their meal. This lack of regular meal times, speed-eating, and over-riding body’s hunger signals, sets us up for a broken metabolism, confused hormones, and selecting foods high in sugar, unhealthier fats, and too many calories.

Sometimes it’s not even the food choices as much as the timing. Trying to get all your macro and micro nutrients in one meal (typically the evening meal) because you’re so busy, maybe even missed a lunch break, can result in indigestion, over production of the hormone insulin, over consumption of protein (our bodies can only absorb so much at one sitting), and puts us into a food coma for the evening.

Meal planning puts Food on your Schedule

The meal I’ve seen people struggle with the most is lunch. In fact, I’m seeing more people skip lunch versus breakfast! Lunch has its own set of challenges – environment, time, food choices and preparation. Some work environments don’t provide adequate resources for safely storing food.

Many of us engage in “desk top dining” – eating in front of our computer or an over reliance on microwavable meals quickly leads to food fatigue – food becomes boring. The cost of purchasing our lunch, whether at the work site or off, can cause serious damage to the wallet. This often results in gravitating toward fast-food type restaurants.

Prepping for lunch meals does take thought and commitment yet the benefits of looking forward to your lunch meal is one way of showing yourself some self-love. The next article in this 2-part series on meal planning will provide tips on making lunch meal prep a sustainable part of your life.

5 Easy Steps to Meal Planning

1. Create your goal for meal planning.

For most of us the main goal for planning our meals is to save time, money, and ease up on food decisions. However, a secondary goal is to place the focus on the food – how novel is that?  If you’re goal is to move into a healthier eating profile, planning your meals is the cornerstone for this change. For those that have a nutrition prescription for specific foods to alleviate everything from arthritis to kidney disease meal planning provides the blueprint for compliance.

For women experiencing symptoms of peri-menopause or menopause, meal planning can help to alleviate those missed meals, which results in rocky blood sugar levels. Unstable blood sugar is the gateway for cravings, uncontrolled snacking, and overeating. All things that result in eating too many calories or sourcing of calories from foods devoid of nutrients or worst, those that aggravate hormones and cause symptoms associated with fluctuating hormones.

2. Establish your food budget.

The food budget is one room of our spending house that we have more control over than we believe. We often only look at how much we spend on food but what about how much we lose in food waste.

Food waste of a typical American household is estimated at ~ $700 per year. That may not sound like much but think of this. What could happen if you contributed that $700 to your retirement savings, a 401(k) or IRA each year invested with an average annual 8% return, after 30 years, you could be looking at over $72,000 in savings!

Don’t forget to browse at the weekly specials (on-line or mailed fliers) to coordinate your meals with the stores sales. There’s nothing as sweet as saving money on your favorite foods. Keeping a dollar figure in mind for weekly spending helps to avoid the urge to splurge on hyper-marketed foods too.

3. What’s in your cupboard?

Before you think about what you’re going to eat, take a weekly inventory of your fridge, freezer and cupboards. Food waste is tied to expiration dates and using your current food stock helps to reduce this money sucking vacuum. This helps to create a shopping list that captures your actual needs and reduce impulse purchases too.

Look for free-to-download shopping or for those tech-savvy try an app. Click here for 3 genius apps.

4. Create your meal plan.

You get to choose – you can create a meal plan for the typical 3 meals, 3 meals plus 1-2 snacks, or for a specific meal like dinner. You get to decide what your needs are. Select a day of the week and carve out 10-15 minutes to write down your plan.

To make meal planning time a habit, “anchor” it on to something you already do. For me, it’s early Sunday morning while I have my coffee. The quietness of the hour along with a well-rested mind, allows my creative juices to flow.

5. Visit your favorite grocery store.

How often you grocery shop depends on several factors. Research in 2017 shows the average American grocery shops 1.2 times per week. That’s down from 2.6 times per week.

Striving for a consistent day to food shop dove tails with your meal planning. If Sunday’s are the only day due to work commitments, don’t skip it. Once the work week begins, you may end up not making that trip at all.

Home-delivery of groceries is just a click away! Whether you click on the foods you want and pick it up or have it delivered to your door, this type of shopping is slowly gaining momentum. This can be a backup plan for the times when your schedule demands extra time for work or personal needs.

If you’re a work-from-home person or retired, establishing set day(s) to shop will help to solidify your meal plans. Use your flexibility to identify days/times when the store is less busy or has their produce shelves filled with top-quality fruits and veggies. I found that early Monday morning had the least desirable fresh produce available but that by mid-day the shelves were adorned with that day’s deliveries.

What’s your Meal Planning Persona?

We all have a meal planning persona. Whether it’s our wish or reality, or a mixture of both, identifying our persona helps when we get to the next step of meal planning – meal preparation!

Discover your Meal Planning Persona here!

In a few days, part 2 of this series on meal planning will share my “10 Tips to Meal Prep like a Pro!

By the way, I’d love to hear what your meal planning persona is. Don’t forget to Discover your Meal Planning Persona for a whimsical look at your inner Chef!