Lo-Co Meal Planning
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Meal Planning. “UGH” I can almost hear you say. Who has time? Who wants to plan?
I hear ya. And I’ve gotten so lazy about meals and meal planning… and my weight is starting to creep up so I’m concerned my cholesterol probably is as well. I need to start meal planning again so I did a little research for some tips.
I got a little help from the folks over at Kitchenda. After reading my 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines Published post, they suggested their article, Why Experts Recommend Meal Planning For Every Home, might be helpful. And they’re right: meal planning is a useful tool for anyone looking to eat heart-healthy, and theirs is an informative, if lengthy, article. The first half has a lot of detail on WHY to meal plan. For some great tips on HOW to meal plan, scroll about half-way down and start reading after TIPS FOR THE ULTIMATE MEAL PLAN.
In exploring other meal prep/planning tools, I decided to look again at Dana White‘s blog. Dana is a Registered Dietician and is the Nutritionist for the foodnetwork.com and Healthy Eats Blog. She suggests a simpler, more creative approach to meal planning. In Meal Planning Tips: Dinner Road Map, Dana explains how to create a weekly road map for healthy weekday dinners. And since Dana’s plan is always 1 day for fish, 1 for vegetarian / plant-based and 1 for pizza, that leaves just 2 days to blank-slate plan! And this, to me, feels far more manageable.
Also, Dana’s recipes rock. Her 4 Weeks of Weeknight Dinners post has awesome ideas for easy, healthy, DELICIOUS (even kid-friendly!) weekday dinners. I’ve made several recipes in this post, including Slow Cooker Coconut Chicken – which was amazing even though I made a HUGE error cooking it!
I need to get cracking with some meal planning. On Mother’s Day I ended up prepping and cooking a lot of vegetables for the week (lest you think poorly of my husband, we did have restaurant plans but they were cancelled when a friend came down with covid). I’d forgotten what a GIFT it is to have a fridge chock full of healthy ingredients ready to add to pasta or salad for easy, healthy weekday meals.
