March Is National Nutrition Month – Plan Meals to Save Money and Boost Nutrition
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Collapse ▲Knowing what your meals are for the up-coming week will lower your grocery bill, reduce food wastage, and allow you to focus on other issues than “What’s for dinner?” After you get the hang of it, it only takes a few minutes to sit down and write your plan for the week before making a grocery list. Since it’s not written in stone, it’s easy to switch your plan around based on what you’re craving.
While there are different ways to plan, I’ll share what works for me:
- Make a list of meals that you and your family like and easily prepare. Include space for new recipes that you would like to try, as it’s easy to get into a cooking rut. At a minimum, include in your meal a protein, whole grain or starchy vegetable, and a non-starchy vegetable.
- Use a weekly meal plan template to write down meals. But first, think about your schedule for the week. What evenings are you out for a kid’s event, a meeting, church or other commitment? Consider what you might do for meals on those evenings. Do you have time to eat at home if you have something prepared to heat up? That’s where cooking once and eating twice comes in. And it’s especially nice to have food ready to heat after an evening work-out session, when you are feeling ravenous.
- Take a look at your list of favorite easy-to-prepare meals and start with dinner. Plan the meals with perishable vegetables soon after shopping and use frozen later in the week.
- Next, consider lunch. You may have favorite salads or sandwiches you like pack. To me, taking what is left from dinner to work the next day sure beats a sandwich and is way cheaper than eating out. If you agree, cook large portions at dinner-time to re-heat. You may have more repetition with breakfast and lunch than with dinner, but that’s okay.
- Breakfast is perhaps the easiest, as most of us are happy with similar meals every day. You may have 3 or 4 meals that you choose from, depending on your mood and how much time you have in the morning.
- Based on what you plan to eat for the week, check out what you already have on-hand, and make a list of what you need to purchase.
Basically, it’s Plan, Shop, Fix and Eat. If this process sounds overwhelming, planning a couple of meals a week is a good beginning. Like the National Nutrition Month logo says “Eat Right, Bite by Bite”. Good nutrition doesn’t have to be restrictive or overwhelming. Small goals and changes can have a cumulative healthful effect, and every little bit (or bite!) of nutrition is a step in the right direction.
