How Meal Planning Makes Life Easier and Healthier
Tips for Meal Planning
When it comes to eating, it’s generally much healthier to cook your meals at home, as opposed to eating at restaurants or fast food takeout places. However, a lot of people feel like they don’t have enough time to cook at home. Others may feel like cooking at home is too difficult.
Meal planning can solve these issues. When you plan your meals, and do some preparation in advance, it becomes easier to cook at home and to have healthy and nutritious meals every day.
Here are some tips.
Have Theme Nights
One of the easiest ways to plan your meals is to keep a schedule and stick to it, and one of the simplest ways to remember your schedule is to do the same thing every week. Of course, this doesn’t mean eating the exact same thing each week. To make it easy, but still give yourself some variety, come up with “theme” nights. For instance, make Monday “pasta night” and Tuesday “soup night,” etc. You can always have a different pasta dish or different soup, but having the theme in mind will make it easier to plan and remember.
Find Recipes, Then Make a Shopping List
Do some research online or in cook books and come up with some recipes that you want to cook in the coming week. Then take a look at what you have at home and make a shopping list for the items you need to make your recipes a reality. This will make going grocery shopping much easier and less time consuming.
Plan for Leftovers
One of the easiest things you can do is cook once and eat twice. Make some extra food for dinner on Monday and you can have it for lunch or dinner on Tuesday. You don’t have to have an entire meal of leftovers either. For instance, if you cook chicken to eat with potatoes and vegetables on one day, use the leftover chicken as part of a stir-fry or a sandwichthe next day.
Prepare in Advance
Chopping and other preparation can take a while. When you get home from work, you might not want to spend another half hour cutting and measuring ingredients before you can start cooking. To resolve this issue, chop your ingredients before you go to bed at night and place them inside a sealed container in the fridge. Then, when you get home, you can toss them into a pot or pan and you’re done!
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