By Home Decor Contributor Alyssa
One of the things I have the hardest time with is meal planning/prepping. I love to cook, but I also love to go out. I love food, period. If Lee or I get a hankering for something, one of us will probably say something to the effect of, “you know what sounds good…?”, and the other will probably say “oh man…that does sound good.” And then we go get it because, why not? Life is short. Usually a burger and fried pickles at our favorite burger joint down the street, often Mexican food, even more often sushi. But our waist lines started reaping the consequences of the frequent caving to cravings, and we decided it was time to make a change.
I really struggle with sticking to a meal plan because A) they’re a lot of work to prep and make (we try to plan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, which means a lot of pre-cooking for days ahead when all we want to do is veg out on the couch) and B) they’re hard to stick with and plan for. I found a few ways to help ease our woes in this area.
– Shop for a consistent number of meals every time. We shop for four days of meals at a time, so we know that every four days, we will need to go shopping again.
– Choose all your meals ahead of time, and make a list of the ingredients you need. Buy ONLY the ingredients on your shopping list. This one seems like a no-brainer, but we were bad about it for so long, just grabbing what looked good and letting a lot of things go to waste.
– Most importantly: STICK WITH YOUR PLAN! You bought the ingredients for it, so be sure to use them!
Lee is always asking me what’s for dinner what day, what he needs to prep before I get home from work, if we’re missing ingredients for anything, etc. I find when we have something in our kitchen that constantly shows us what’s next, we both feel more informed, at ease, and ready to stick with the plan. I created this little weekly meal plan calendar for both Lee and I to keep focused on what we are going to eat and to help us save money by going out less.
I simply printed the calendar on a regular piece of printer paper, framed it in a cheap frame, and bought a fine tip dry erase marker to write with on the glass of the frame. I like to divide each day of the week in half and write the lunch plan on top and the dinner plan on the bottom. It works great!
I hope you can get some good use out of it and find your life to be at least slightly more organized. 😉
Yes, I like your meal calendar thanks for sharing