Are you always confused about what to cook for your family? If so, start by planning your meals ahead of time.

Meal planning is all about organizing yourself to prepare a meal, either breakfast, lunch, or dinner to suit your family’s nutrition needs. To enable that the family eats healthy, it is important to prepare balanced meals. A balanced meal contains all its desired food nutrients in the right proportion.

Even though meal planning is essential; it’s all about creativity when preparing and serving food. It is good to make mealtime fun and exciting, changing the meals, adding varieties and also making sure it’s a balanced meal.

There’s no perfect way to plan your meal; just know what works perfectly for you, even if it’s not as great as you want at first. Practice makes perfect.

Here are some meal plan tips that will help you could organize nourishing meals for your family all week long.

Meal Planning Tips

1. Spend time to gather and organize recipes

Spend time with your family or friends, share ideas on new meals and plan towards making them. This may look stressful, but just try it. Check for recipes inspirations from blogs and websites.

Just get inspired!

2. Ask your Family what they like to eat

Don’t forget to get inspiration from people at home. Ask them what they enjoy eating most – is a nice way to please and excite your family and also a great way to get food inspirations.

3. Start with your calendar

Whenever you want to prepare a meal for the following week, you need to start with your calendar - just a quick glance will help you figure out what meal works best.

4. Schedule your shopping day

For you to have a successful meal plan, you need to set aside time for shopping, and preparation of the meal. Take time to go through your recipes, before creating your shopping list. This will help you bring your meal plan ideas to fulfilment.

5. Prepare Your Food Quickly

When back from shopping, cook your food as soon as possible. You can start by preparing some of the ingredients for cooking - like washing and slicing your vegetables and chopping of onions.

6. Utilize Your Freezer

Got some leftover food? Freeze your leftover soup, chicken, stew, and cooked beans – it will surprise you how your leftover will still look fresh and delicious for the next few days. This also helps you to cook less, reduce food waste and save more money.

7. Stock your Pantry

Cooking meals are quicker and easier if your pantry food store is well-stocked. Don’t run out of things like oil, spices, canned fruits, canned vegetables, nuts, and canned fish/beef. It helps you quickly dress up something simple without going to the grocery store.

With these few tips you can enjoy healthy meals with your family, just start by generating the habit of meal planning.

Benefits of Meal Planning

Meal planning has a lot of advantages. It’s smooth to prepare dinner a quick comfort food or head to a restaurant whilst everyone is hungry and nothing is defrosted, but a bit of meal plans can prevent this!

  1. Save Time: Meal planning helps you to save time, you get to be productive and meet up with all you need to cook for the day. It gives room to cook in bulk and freeze for future meals.
  2. Add variety: Variety is the spice of life. It may seem meal planning is boring and rigid, but it gives room for spontaneity and avoids the trap of eating the same meals over and over.
  3. Saves Money: Meal planning gives room for family and meal budgeting. It helps to keep a record of necessary food items that are needed and makes provision for it.
  4. Prevent Food wastage: With meal planning, you are sure to use all of your food items that day, week or month because you tend to get the right amount of food needed. Food is being cooked at right proportion for the family.
  5. Eat balanced meal: Consuming balanced meals is essential for so many factors of health, but it also takes advanced meal plan. Meal planning makes you decide before you ever go to the grocery store what kind of food your family will eat every week so you can buy healthy ingredients and remember that you will use them.

The main purpose of meal planning is for you to make sure you sort out a process that is less stressful, effective and enjoyable. It can be considered as a chore to add to your to-do-list. Some plan according to their schedule, sometimes even monthly. Meal planning is actually a personal thing, find your own system and perfect it.