What’s for Dinner?
What’s for Dinner?
The Benefits of Meal Planning
Does dinner time come around with no idea of what to eat?
Are you often frustrated with a lack of planning?
An hour a week will allow you to reap the benefits of having a dinner plan. What are the benefits of planning ahead? Let me tell you!
- Take away indecision – Having a plan means you don’t have to make decisions day after day.
- Less bad choices – Without time and thought it’s hard to make good choices all the time.
- More balance – Creating a meal template will save you time planning.
- More variety – Giving yourself the opportunity to focus on something new because the basics are done.
- Less waste – Use the food you have planned your menu around and reduce waste.
- More money saved – Only buy what you need and avoid tossing unused or expired food.
- Less arguing – You can’t make everyone happy all the time, but if everyone knows there is balance in your menu, their day will come.
Try creating a basic meal plan. Make a list of your family’s favorite proteins, starches, and vegetables (or whatever your family eats for dinner). Make a template, including something from each category. If you can, do this for 7 meals for the week.
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Take this exercise further by making a grocery list of items needed to make all these meals. Want to go one step further? Plan breakfast and lunch or plan meals with what’s on sale at your local grocery store.
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Janet Schiesl
Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.
She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.
Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.
Janet Schiesl
Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.
She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.
Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.
I’ve been making meal plans for decades and can’t imagine shopping without one! Early in the pandemic, I wanted to reduce shopping trips as much as I could, so I scrapped the plans and just bought lots of everything, but it didn’t take me long to realize that wasn’t working very well.
Planning is always helpful.
I not only do the meal plan for the week but then immediately follow it up with putting together the grocery list for everything I will need to cook those meals. That saves me time and money as I only go to the store once a week.
We used to do the same. It was my job to create the meal plan and make the list and then my husband would do the shopping. It works well for us. Now that we are empty-nesters we are a little more flexible.
You are so right. Planning is healthier, saves time, money and there’s less waste. I try to plan from what I already have in the refrigerator and pantry. I just hate throwing out good food that hasn’t been used.
I’ve too have found that when you shop from a list, there’s so much less impulse shopping and you come home with what you need.
I’m also a fan of left-over nights. I actually like left-overs, but if really does save money.
My daughter is trying to show her boyfriend that cooking at home really can save a lot of money (he tends to order food all the time). I agree that having a plan just alleviates the burden of decision making over and over again, day after day. Plan once a week and then you don’t have to worry about it every day.
We are Eat-at-Home people and you do save a lot of money. I think some of the reasons that people order in is that they didn’t plan ahead.
I’ve never been a meal planner or much of a recipe user. However, I do always have ingredients on hand to put meals together. We mostly eat fresh fruit and vegetables with some proteins. So a typical meal includes raw veggies (a salad) with protein. There isn’t much cooking involved, and it’s easy to pull together meals. I spend time washing and cutting vegetables in advance, so it makes salad assembly easier. The only time I do official meal planning is when we’re hosting large parties and events (Thanksgiving, Passover, BBQs, etc…)
I have great admiration for the meal planners of the world.
Thanks Linda. It looks like you and Sabrina are the same.
I love these tips! I love to cook but do not like to plan for dinners. I decide every day in the morning for the evening dinner. I can say that I probably have more food in the freezer than we need but, I don’t mind. If I find that I bought too many vegetables, I end up roasting a bunch at one time. I preheat the oven to 450 degrees and place the cut veggies on a baking sheet with olive oil and garlic with herbs and bake for 20 minutes, and we eat it for a few days as a side to our meal. That clears out my fridge very quickly, and the veggies are super yummy. =)
I love meal planning, but whatever works for you. Thanks for the tips on roasted vegetables.
This is a timely read for me – we’d been really good about meal planning for over a year, but recently I dropped the habit. I find that I’m tired of the same old meals, and didn’t have energy on the weekends to come up with new ideas before the weekly grocery trip. My husband may have snapped me out of that by reminding me of a few dishes he and I love that had not been in the standard meal rotation… Now to plan some weekend time to devote to creating the plan for next week!
It’s good to change it up once in a while. I think I’m more flexible in the summer, trying to think of no-cooking meals and grilling options. Then, when the weather gets cold I go back to my standard plan.
I love your list of benefits and totally concur. Meal planning is such an effective way of saving money and time as well as a great tool for ensuring healthier eating.
Thanks Sheri.
I always suggest meal planning to clients. They think it is too big a job. Once I explain that you do it for a month and then repeat 4 for plans for half a year they see it can be less work than they thought. After 6 months plan 4 weeks for another month and use those for 6 months. Soon you’ll have 4 months of plans that you use in a row and repeat 3 times a year.
Wow, I’ve never gotten that involved in planning. I think because I like a lot of variety. I’m glad you explained it. Good suggestion.
Meal planning is always a challenge – when I’m doing it regularly it’s easy, but when I don’t, it seems like an impossible task. Thanks for the reminder to try again – like Linda, I do better preparing the constituents of a meal ahead of time so I can always pull something together. Written meal plans tend to bring out my inner 13-year-old.
I’ve been doing a lot of meal prep and cooking on Sunday to get ready for the week. It’s working well for me. Glad it works for you too.
Everything you advise is correct, but I can’t fathom actually doing it. I like to eat, but I hate to cook. Scratch that, I don’t cook. In winter, I will boil water to have pasta; in the summer, I’ll throw a lot of things into a bowl to make a salad. But otherwise, I hate cooking like other people hate going to the dentist. (I hate that too, but I do it.) I revere all of your advice, and all of you who are able to plan meals ahead, but I can’t fathom deciding to eat something hours or days ahead and then just eating it. I have to be in the mood for something, and I don’t know at 9 a.m. (let alone the prior Sunday) what I’m going to feel like eating at 6 o’clock. I mean, I may plan all day to have Chinese food, but around 5 p.m. start craving Mexican food; if I just went ahead and had Chinese food because it was what I planned instead of eating what I wanted, I’d be miserable; it would ruin the meal and my evening. Do you all just not have strong cravings that demand satisfaction? Do I just have a more deeply ingrained culinary id, while you all have a more mature culinary superego to rein you in? 😉
Julie, I think planning is most important when you have several or many people to feed. Then you can’t please everyone and you have to put something on the table. Now that it’s just me and my husband we are more flexible and have those conversations like “what do you want for dinner?” But we do like to cook so those conversations are more along the line of “I’m stopped at the store on my way home. What do you want for dinner?”