With the beginning of fall comes the return of routine. Kids are back to school, vacations are done, and everyone gets back on their regular schedule. Believe it or not, for some people (mostly parents), the start of a new school year comes as a welcome respite after an often chaotic summer.

How does this relate to long-term weight loss? It’s simple.  There is no part of your weight loss program that responds better to routine and scheduling than weekly meal planning.  Taking time to effectively meal plan will lead to smarter, healthier eating and also removes a great deal of the stress that comes from the common question of the ill-prepared: “what should I eat now?”

You’ll notice that the primary focus of this piece is not specifically weight loss. And yet, it is. By planning your meals and snacks, it allows you to make sure that you can eat a well-balanced diet each day and week, hitting your individual goals for calories, carbs, fats, protein… whatever it is you decide to hang your hat on.

Meal planning is yet another tool in the weight loss tool box, just like food tracking and learning how to make small changes to your diet. Each of these play a vital role in allowing you to craft your own personalized weight loss plan.

The reason we track what we eat is to see how we’re doing, but the reason we plan is to try to meet our goals.

If you’ve been told to meal plan in the past, you’ve probably seen it as some sort of punishment for being overweight.  Because that’s how it’s often presented.  This could not be further from the truth.  It really is a vital part of learning how to eat happy and healthy (and save money too!) and a worthwhile focus for those who are serious about changing the way they eat.

Meal Planning Helps You Eat Fresh

There are few things that cause more stress in a busy household than figuring out what’s for dinner on a nightly basis.  Same goes for scrambling around to figure out lunch in a chaotic workplace.  And we all know what happens most of the time in those situations. We reach for what’s easy, what’s familiar, and what’s quick.

At home, that often means those long shelf life foods that are easy to prepare, such as pasta.  Or, worse, frozen meals. Yes, some of those have the word “healthy” on them, but maybe don’t congratulate yourself too much on that one, ok?

If you’re not at home, you can substitute the word “fast” for “quick”… which is often the kind of food we end up grabbing on-the-go for lunch.

But just a bit of time invested in meal planning at the start of the week will allow you to plan healthier meals, and have fresh food options stocked and ready for your meals and snacks when you need them.

This means introducing fresh fruits and vegetables, a variety of proteins, and eliminating a reliance on anything that comes out of a package. But this can only be done by setting aside a few minutes at the start of each week to plan your meals.

Meal Planning Stops Food Boredom

If you don’t currently meal plan but still try to eat healthy, it probably means you’ve got a few “go to” healthy meal options.  And you “go to” them… a lot.

Most likely you know how to prepare one or two dishes that are relatively healthy, and you always make sure to add the ingredients for those meals to your weekly grocery list.

The end result? When you’re scrambling for something to make, you end up making that “beloved” favorite a little more often than you’d like. You might make it so often that you end up naming a particular day of the week with the food you’re eating by default. When that happens, you know you’re eating it too often.

Meal planning will help you avoid that. You can still keep successful dishes in a rotation.  Like a disc jockey of food, maybe you play your hits in heavy rotation every few weeks, and just work in a list of other classics throughout the month. 

The other part of not getting bored is trying new things, and meal planning allows you to do just that.  Once you start to have a nice rotation of meals you like, you’ll be able to get a bit adventurous.  Try a new protein or vegetable each week. Or try a new preparation of an old favorite. If it works, it can stay in the rotation. Meal planning allows you the freedom to branch out and be healthy at the same time.  

When you see recipes that sound interesting to you online, or in print somewhere, print it and keep it near where you make your weekly meal plan.  That way, you’ll be inclined to try something new from that list once a week, and you’ll have also have the ingredients right in front of you when you’re making your grocery list.

Meal Planning Cuts Your Grocery Bill

If you’re reading this we can assume you’re either currently trying to lose weight or you’re thinking about gearing up to try, right?  The fact is, though, whether you’re trying to eat healthy or not, when you go grocery shopping without a meal plan it leads to over shopping. You wander around the store and you put items into your cart with the idea that you could make “something” out that “sometime” buying too many items you’ll never use.

Without a meal plan we tend also to get caught in the middle of the grocery store, where all of the most unhealthy items reside. On the perimeter of the store are the fresh items – the fruit, the vegetables, the fish counter, meat, etc… and in the center is all the packaged good.

Even when you’re trying to lose weight, without a meal plan you get drawn in by all the packages with labels like “diet” and “lo-cal” and “sugar free”.

This over shopping leads to having to toss food items as they pass their expiration dates, which is no different than throwing away your money. What’s worse is that this non-targeted shopping often won’t help you cook a new recipe on the spur of the moment some night, as you’ll often find you’re missing one or two ingredients you need to actually make the dish.  So it doesn’t work out and it’s back to “Spaghetti Saturday.”

Meal planning allows you to shop for what you need to make the food you’re going to eat.  You’ll find that you either spend less on your groceries, or you spend the same, but end up eating a much higher quality of product because more of your money will be going into the food that goes into your body not into the trash.

Cook Once, Eat Twice

One of the great things about meal planning is that you can use one recipe to cover several meals, through planned leftovers.  By planned leftovers I mean cooking the exact number of servings of a meal you need.   For example, you might need two servings of an entrée for dinner on Monday night, and then plan on two people in your household taking it to work as lunch on Tuesday.  If that’s the case, you’ll be making four servings on Monday night.

If leftovers aren’t everyone’s thing, you can still re-purpose a protein for multiple meals.  Perhaps that grilled chicken you serve on Tuesday night might be chopped up and used as part of Thursday night’s Honey Mustard Chicken Salad entrée.

All of this is done in advance, through meal planning.  Trust me, after a few weeks, you get really good at this particular aspect of it. 

It’s another way you’ll find that your shopping dollar will go much further too, as you’ll become very efficient with your use of some expensive ingredients.

Meal Planning Isn’t Just About Meals

If you’re working hard at eating healthier meals, you might still getting tripped up with your snacks. Either you’re eating too many unhealthy snacks, or you find yourself grazing through the cupboards and fridge in the evening looking for a good snack as you just pile on the calories. Either way, ruining whatever good work you might have done earlier in the day.

The solution to all of these problems is meal planning.  You don’t have to go so far as to plan out exactly which snacks you’ll eat on which day, but you can come up with a varied list of healthy enjoyable snacks… and add them to your grocery list.

That way, when you go “grazing” you’ll find only those healthy options for which you shopped and planned.   We eat what we have in front of us a lot of times, so give yourself a fighting chance by putting delicious healthy snack choices within reach when you need them.

And if one of two of those snacks is a little indulgent?  Well, if you’ve planned your meals and know you’ve got room for it? Then great, no guilt there, right?

Meal Plan Outside Your Home too

Believe it or not, meal planning is portable.  Bring it to work with you.  Bring it on vacation.  Sometimes it takes a bit of extra work, but it can really help you out if you know how to do it.

If you go out to lunch with co-workers on a daily basis, meal planning just means taking a look at menus in advance.  If you have input in the restaurants you go to, see if you can find the ones that have options that fit in with your eating goals and suggest those.  If not, look at the menus of the restaurants you will be going to and know in advance what your healthiest options are.  Worst case, you can always eat smaller portions. Or, and again, this is part of planning, you’ll know to PLAN a smaller dinner than night if you’re going to be having a larger lunch.

Some Final Meal Planning Thoughts…

Start out by planning just your dinners, or just your lunches… or whatever part of your week feels comfortable to you.  Just try to take control of one part of your weekly plan and go from there.  You’ll begin to see progress in all the sections of this essay as you do so.

Even though you want to fill your menu with fresh foods, it’s a good idea to have something as a standard “emergency” meal always in stock.  For example, we always keep black bean veggie burgers in the freezer, which will work as an easy lunch when there isn’t a planned leftover from a night before.  I don’t want to eat that five days a week, but I’m fine planning to eat it once or twice.

Lastly, you can Google “meal plans” and find a myriad of ready-made meal plans out there from nutritionists, diet programs, health food companies, and the like.   Unfortunately most of them are just trying to sell you something (such as their ready-made food, or meal supplement shakes, etc).  The point is, even if you find one that has a bunch of food items that are somewhat appealing to you, it isn’t DESIGNED for you.  The only meal plan designed for you, will be the meal plan designed BY you. 

It’ll take you some time to get a good meal plan rotation going… but once you learn how to build it yourself, you’ll be very glad you added this skill to your repertoire. Good luck!