What are you doing tomorrow? I’ll be working on my game plan for next week’s meals and I was thinking how much meal planning has changed my life. #notbeingdramatic
Does this sound familiar?
Stressed out.
Hate grocery shopping.
Try to save money with coupons but you just can’t get the hang of it.
Ordering take-out last minute.
Feeling crappy from eating crappy.
That was my life before meal planning. I’m not being all dramatic when I say I truly believe meal planning is THE way to change the stress level in your daily life.
If you’re not planning or making your meals for next week, I encourage you to check out these top 5 reasons you should start – like tomorrow! – and then we can be bmpff (that’s best meal planning friends forever, in case you didn’t know).
Save $1000/year
Spending $10 on lunch twice a week, pizza every Friday night, or a $2 coffee every weekday will cost you $1000 each year. Yikes!
Planning is the key here or it’ll be too easy to fall back into the take-out trap. Make sure you have everything for those kids’ lunches, make sure you’ve got some canned homemade tomato sauce in the pantry, and make sure you have dinners planned.
Save gobs and gobs of time
If I had a nickel for every time I heard “I don’t have time to meal plan” I swear I’d have enough to buy my own Magnolia Farms-style farmhouse. (Gah, I looooove that show! But who doesn’t???)
If I added up all the time I spent each day thinking about what to feed the kids, who eats what, and starting at the fridge hoping something would jump out and say “eat me!”, it would be around an hour a day!
Oh, you do that too? Then get plannin’ girl!
Stop wasting brain power
It’s been proven that you can only make so many decisions in a day. And as the day goes on, your resolve/will power/brain power drains.
If you’re not planning at least dinner, that means you’re postponing a really important decision until late in the day, when you don’t have a lot of that left.
If you take the time all at once, say at the beginning of the week, to plan out just dinners, you won’t have to scramble and waste time at 6 pm to figure out what you have in the fridge, what you have in the pantry, what you could make that everyone likes, and then have to actually make it.
Phew, that drained me just thinking about it!
STOP WASTING FOOD
If you’re planning your meals, you won’t have all this extra food in the back of the crisper turning into a science project.
You’ll only be buying what you’re going to eat and what you’re going to freeze for the future.
Does that mean you can’t buy that 12 pound watermelon? No, of course not. But if you have the rest of your meal + canning plan done and you come across something like that, you will know if it can fit into your plan or not. And if it doesn’t, you buy a few slices of watermelon instead.
‘Cuz let’s face it, once you entertain the idea of a ginormous watermelon, you’re gonna have to have some.
Eat healthier
If you’ve made it this far, bravo for sticking with me! Also, if you’ve made it this far, you realize that this one is a no-brainer.
Improved health is an awesome side effect of planning and making your own food.
You’ll be eating out less, you’ll be eating less processed – no more “I’m just gonna grab this Lean Cuisine right here” – junk, and you’ll automatically start incorporating fruits + veggies into the plan, and into the can. (see what I did there???)
Your homemade muffins won’t have corn syrup in them. Your lasagna won’t be filled with preservatives and crap you can’t pronounce.
Save money.
Save time.
Hang onto your brain power.
Waste less food.
Aaaaaand eat healthier?
Yes, please!
