Effective meal planning is about making life easy, convenient, keeping things within budget, and of course meeting your nutritional needs for health. Not optimised health, we don’t need to get preachy, this is about keeping a down-to-earth approach, having both accountability and flexibility, because life isn’t rigid, can’t always be audited, and needs space for adaptations.

Getting to know your food habits

Effective meal planning is about a meeting your needs, if you are not sure whether you do or don’t meet your needs, and nutrition, diet, and food shopping is all a bit of a nightmare, then starting by getting to know (in a very plain black and white way) what your current habits are is going to be very helpful.

Many people avoid doing the food diary journal thing because of blame, shame, and not wanting to write down what they perceive as being ‘bad habits’ or ‘unhealthy food’. but there is no such thing as ‘bad habits’ or ‘unhealthy food’. When we look at doing this properly, we are not just looking at food, we are looking at lifestyle, and things that you may be able to account for as driving your habits and therefore giving you the ability to work around it so it’s not a thing anymore. All behaviours have a reason, when we discover what that is, (it could be as simple as just a generally busy life with a lot of commitments) then we can re-jig things about to suit us better. The aim of this doing an initial food journal if-you-will is to help with meal planning, and what that may look like for you to be of use, it’s about making life less stressful, easier to manage, less expensive, and allowing for the freedom to enjoy stuff more knowing your health and well-being is adequately supported.

Understanding what you are trying to achieve

To make it easy and take the emotional stuff out of the equation and ask, if you were to plan your meals ahead what benefit would you like the most?

• Not having to cook through the week, having to consider what’s for dinner

• Reduce snacking and eat better

• Budget properly so you can manage the food bill

• Encourage your family to have meal times and get together on an agreed plan

• Help children take responsibility and include them in choices and expectations

• Weight, health, fitness, or performance related goals

• Anything else….

Now you know what you want to achieve you have your focus point. This takes the process from being a chore to a point of learning to gain knowledge that you can apply, test, and build confidence in.

Getting to know the fundamentals of nutrition

The fundamentals of nutrition are childs play, literally, I say this because in many places it is taught in schools as part of the curriculum before GCSE. As adults we forget, life moves on and gets in our way, marketing gets to us, as does supermarket advertising, skewing our views and experiences. Just getting back to understanding and applying nutrition fundamentals will help you to know what you need to do.

Planning your menu

Once you have your habits in plain view, you have refreshed your knowledge on fundamental understanding of nutrition you are ready to plan ahead, the plan here should pretty much write itself- all you have to do it stick to it, change bits as you work through the plan to mitigate the issues that prevented you from sticking to your plan. Now you have fluid plan, one you can adapt as you go, trial and error with a record so you can build knowledge and confidence as you go.

I hope you enjoyed this article and took some useable knowledge from it to help you understand your biology and meet your needs in relation to your goals. Please leave a comment, press the heart button and share it to help more people take control of their health, well-being and fitness.

Samantha