Meal planning is your absolute best key to success when it comes to sticking to a healthy diet. A great meal plan takes all of the guess work out of eating, and makes sure you are always prepared. Effective meal planning is what makes a healthier diet and lifestyle an easy, obtainable goal.
Meal planning is all about preparation and thinking ahead. Most people put together their meal plans for a week or so at a time, but to make your life even easier you can plan even a whole month of meals. That means a whole month of easy, no guess work meals that are catered to your specific tastes and preferences.
How exactly does one plan a whole month of healthy meals? Effective meal planning, even for extended periods, may be easier than you think.
Research
The majority of the meal planning work comes in the form of simple research. Many meal plans fail because they are simply not interesting enough. Conversely, some meal plans fail because they are too complicated to follow through. The purpose of research is to find simple yet interesting meal ideas that fit into your healthy diet plan. You can find a lot of healthy recipe ideas on the internet, or in cookbooks and magazines.
Charting
As you find recipes that you would like to incorporate into your month of meals, start building a chart of what you plan to eat and which days you want to eat those meals on. Keep in mind your busy schedule, for example saving the more complicated meals that may take longer for days when you have little going on after work or weekends. Schedule quick and easy meals during the week or on days you expect to be busy. Your chart will need to coordinate with your calendar, so keep your plans in mind.
Organization
One of the keys to effective meal planning is making lists. One of the major lists you will make is your calendar coordinated chart of which meals you will eat on which days. The other lists you will make will be your ingredient lists, taken straight from your recipes. Writing everything down this way helps you to not forget anything important. It also helps remind you to keep things as simple as possible, because seeing a month’s worth of ingredients could be overwhelming if your recipes are too complicated.
Organization also means coordinating meals with each other. For example, if one night you make a delicious and hearty vegetable stew, you will likely have left overs. So another night, maybe a couple nights later, you might be able to use those leftovers as part of another meal, such as baked potatoes with the stew as a topping.
Shopping and Prep Work
Shopping for a whole month, especially when you are using lots of healthy fresh produce, may be better broken down a week at a time. Prep work, such as chopping up veggies to make them recipe ready, is also a great once a week task to make your month so much easier. If you organize yourself and schedule each task, your meal plan is much more likely to be successful.
Organizing yourself this way and building a monthly meal plan can make your life so much easier than you thought possible. You can put those days of running yourself ragged trying to figure out what’s for dinner behind you, and focus on getting healthy instead. Month by month, you will take the guess work out of eating with your new healthy lifestyle. Look for more ways to a healthy lifestyle here!!
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