If you ever happen to look at the fitness tags on Instagram or Pinterest, you’ll probably be bombarded with meal planning and how it’s essential if you want to lose weight, save money, yada yada yada. I mean, we all know that right? Planning healthy, cheap meals is obviously going to save you some calories and money. The actual issue tends to be a) the actually getting down to planning meals and b) the sticking to said meal plan. Despite these issues, I have actually found myself getting better at meal planning for past few weeks (or sticking to it anyway) so I thought I’d share my wisdom on how to meal plan and stick to it.
1. Get a meal planner and stick it where you see it every day
If you like lists or stationary, this is 100% essential. Meal plans made on my iPhone note never got updated, let alone consulted over, yet now I have a really cute meal planner (and a shopping list so I can buy all the ingredients!) I love sitting down on a Sunday morning and planning my meals, it makes me feel very Pinteresty and cute and productive. I keep mine hung on the wall next to where I sit and eat breakfast and dinner, so that I can know exactly what I need for my next meal – if I’m eating breakfast and see I need to defrost something for dinner, I can do it while it’s fresh in my head, and I make my lunches either after dinner, or while I’m waiting for it to cook.
Mine was a bargaineous £2.99 from Aldi, they don’t have them anymore but if you want to splash out £8 Paperchase has the cutest ones ever.
2. Be realistic with your meals
At no point in my life have I finished work, gone to the gym, waited in the cold for the bus and finally got in around half 7 and thought, oh let’s cook a feast today. My requirement for evening meals is that they’re simple, quick and yet still healthy, so when I meal plan I don’t put in elaborate plans that require for six recipe books and a two hour wait. My evening meals tend to be things like baked sweet potato (microwaved for 10 minutes then ovened for 10 for crispy deliciousness without the wait) with brocolli (frozen), quorn, and sauteed onions and mushrooms, or a tuna pasta bake stuffed with veg, or egg fried bulgar wheat with veg and quorn pieces. Everything I make can either be cooked in 20 – 30 minutes, or can be prepared in 15 minutes and left to cook on their own device.
For lunch, I tend to pack things I can assemble at work (wrap, filling, salad; pitta, hummus, veggie sticks; baked potato, beans, salad) or leftover pasta from the evening before. These all literally take 5 minutes, keep the ingredients fresh, and fill me up at lunch and mean I’m not running over to the shop for chocolate. I always take in snacks for work, normally along the lines of one piece of fruit, a Babybel or a yoghurt, and maybe some healthy crisps or popcorn if I have a long run planned.
3. Utilise leftovers
I’m really not a fan of having the same meal for two days in a row, so for me leftovers isn’t about having an identical meal on both the Monday and Tuesday – I make spare components of a meal and use them for something different. So, for example, if I had vegetarian sausages and mash and gravy one day, I could make spare sausages and have a sausage pasta bake the next day, or I could make extra mash and make potato cakes the next day. Chilli can be had with rice, sweet potato wedges, a baked potato, or even inside a tortilla wrap – that’s four days of food sorted, without the boredom of only eating one meal! A bolognese can be made into a lasagne, vegetables can be made into soup, the possibilities are basically endless.
Of course, you can eat the same meal five days in a row but from experience, you’re more likely to get bored, bin it, and choose something delicious but not quite good for your waistline. I think it’s better just to plan your ingredients ahead so that the meals you make provides something extra for the consequent meals.
4. Plan your meals around your day
This is kind of a similar point to being realistic with your meals, but basically don’t just plan meals blindly and hope you can fit them in. If you know Wednesday is going to be full of client meetings and you might not get a chance to have lunch until 4pm, plan some convenient and discreet snacks to keep you going, a light but nutritious lunch to have at 4, and then a good dinner so that you’re not hungry when you go to bed.
5. Don’t be afraid to change up the plan
As great as a meal plan is, it needs to be flexible or you’ll go off course the minute life gets in the way (which it will, it’s life). You can get around this in a few ways – planning meals to have during the week, but instead setting yourself specific days to have them, decide in the morning and cross it off the list; you could plan back up meals to have, or you could have a ‘meal card’ where you’re allowed to be off the meal plan for one meal, whether it’s because you’ve forgotten your lunch, have to go out for a work dinner, or you forgot about your dinner date with your friend.
So yeah, there you go! Some tips that should hopefully make meal planning a bit more manageable for you – it doesn’t have to be just boxes and boxes of chicken, sweet potato and brocolli for the rest of your life! I personally only meal plan Monday – Friday, unless I’ve seen a recipe I really want to try at the weekend. I think I’d get too bored planning all my meals, especially when I have the whole weekend to think about food, cook up some spontaneous delights and generally try something I wouldn’t have time to in the week. Life is too short to meal plan on weekends, I truly believe that.
Would you consider meal planning or is it a big no for you?
