Menu planning is one of the greatest techniques you can use to stay organized, choose healthy foods, and enjoy a stress-free mealtime every day. Here are a few ways to incorporate menu planning into your lifestyle:

• Get the whole family involved. Take some time when everyone is free, go through cookbooks together, and discuss which foods you do and don’t enjoy. By choosing recipes together, you’ll ensure that everyone is actually going to eat the food you cook! I recommend choosing enough recipes to last a week, but if you have the time, it’s well worth earmarking a dozen recipes or more to have as a go-to in the future.
• Write down your meal plans on a calendar or menu planner. Place it somewhere that’s easily visible for everyone in your household so the whole family knows what to expect for dinner. This is also useful for planning ahead, in case you are going to be working late one night, or will be going out to a restaurant for a dinner celebration, and so on. Anyone who has a nutrition consultation with me gets a Real World Wellness menu planner template!
• Create a grocery list around your meals – and stick to it. You can vastly reduce your grocery bill and increase the amount of nutritious food in your home by going to the store armed with a list of the essential.

• Make meals when it’s convenient for you. If you work 10-hour days, you probably don’t want to cook when you get home from work. This is where the crockpot comes in handy, or making meals ahead of time. You can cook up a batch of soup or pasta sauce on the weekend and then freeze it until you want to use it. Just heat the soup (or cook the pasta) and it’s ready to go.
• Repeat! Do this every week and soon menu planning will become a habit. You’ll find that certain meals become staples, and you can jazz them up by adding additional spices or new veggies or grains to the mix. Have fun with menu planning; it’s a helpful tool to use especially if you feel as though you’re too busy to cook meals.

If you want to learn more about healthy eating and how to incorporate a nutritious diet into your busy lifestyle, please contact me to make a nutrition consulting appointment.