Now that we have read and learned about the importance of Meal Planning and its various benefits (starting from, but not limited to our health), let us see how we can get started with it!
Tips to get started with Meal Planning:
1. Start small when you plan your meals
While there is nothing wrong with being ambitious, in this case, we will advise you to start with smaller steps. Consider beginning to plan your meals for a maximum of 3-4 days initially.
As you get comfortable with the idea and process, you can begin planning for a longer duration.
2. Have specific days for Planning & Shopping
It is a good idea to do this task once/twice a week, maybe on weekend/offdays.).
And, thisis not cast in stone but having designateddays makes iteasy to be consistent and making this into a routine.
3. Familiar Firstin case of Meal Planning
Initially, it is advisable to include meals that one is familiar with and can make without too much investment of time and effort.
Let the initial investment be in the effort of making a meal plan consistently.
This will enable one to ease into the planning mode before one embarks on including a variety in the menu.
4. Estimate Available Time & Pre-occupations
When one sits down to make the meal plan, it really helps to know how busy one is going to be in the coming days.
Is one expecting guests, planning to go out, catering for any special occasion, busy with professional commitments, etc?
Armed with this knowledge, one can plan meals accordingly.
5. Choices & Preferences in Meal Planning
Before you start planning your meals for the coming days, check with the family members what food they are craving for and would like to be included in the meal plan in the coming days.
Once the family suggests something it becomes easy to include it in the meal plan and you will have those many meals less to think about.
6. Special Requirementsin Meal Planning
For making a meal plan, first, create the meal plan with all the special diet requirements and then go back to each meal and include the general meals for everyone else.
This way, you will be able to cater to special diets for those who need them and regular meals for others easily.
7. Prep and be prepared
When you start planning your meals, you can look for meals, which will benefit from a common prep.
You can freeze, prepared masalas for sabzis, daal, and other dishes together and use them as per requirement.
One can prepare batter for Idlis and have it in more than one meal. You may also make Dosas, Uttapams, etc from the same batter with minor adjustments.
You can get vegetables chopped and stored in the fridge and use them when required.
8. Plan for Leftovers(Economise your effort)
You can make a bigger batch of the family’s favorite meal and serve it another time. You will thus save on your time, effort, and resources.
Also, having leftovers in your next meal will prevent food waste.
8. Be Flexiblein Meal Planning
So, you have a Meal Plan ready but don’t let that hold you back.
If you don’t like cooking, go out and dine. Save meal plan for another day!
So, why you should seriously consider Meal Planning? Most of us are used to Meal Planning at a go! While we may have some idea for a meal here or a meal there but more often than not, we are deciding the menus from meal to meal, almost at the last minute.
We wake up in the morning and start thinking of what to cook for breakfast up to lunch, maybe.
And the job is not restricted to just deciding the menu for the meal but also ensuring that the required ingredients are handy else that will require more effort and time to organize those too.
Once this planning for cooking and eating the meal is over, we start thinking about the next meal.
Thus we end up devoting a substantial amount of our time planning for the meals every day whether or not we acknowledge it.
What if, we do things differently! On a preferred day, say Saturday morning you sit down to decide your meal plan for the next few days.
Consider your social and professional commitments of the week, your available time, likes and dislikes, diet requirements of your family, and then plan your meals with these considerations.
Here’s why you should seriously consider Meal Planning!
Meal Planning helps to save time.
When you sit down to plan your meals for the next few days, it may seem like a tedious task initially but it will eventually save you a lot of time. When your plan is ready, you avoid going back and forth on the decision of what to make for each meal.
When it is time to prepare the meal, you won’t need to dash to the stores or order missing groceries at the last minute. You will also avoid multiple visits to the market to buy missing ingredients.
You can plan your trip to the market at a suitable time so that you avoid crowds, and do not have to face long queues at the billing counter. With a grocery list in hand, you will also not aimlessly wander in the shopping aisles and stay focused.
With Meal Planning done, all you have to do is cook – which is not half as difficult as arriving at the decision of what to cook and this answers to the quest of why you should seriously consider Meal Planning!
Meal Planning enables you to save time. You can use this saved time for something that you enjoy doing!
It helps to save money
When you do Meal Planning, you use your resources optimally and wisely.
With a meal plan ready, you will buy the perishables as per your requirement and not get tempted to buy items, which you are not planning to use in your plan.
You will avoid wastage by not cooking extra unnecessary portions. Having said that if the planned meal is to the liking of your family members and they do not mind repeating the dishes in the next meal, you can cook extra. This way you will save on your cooking effort and be able to cater for two meals at one time. This also helps you save on time, effort, and money.
When you are organized, you can get deals on your planned monthly buying of non-perishables so that you can optimize your home budgets rather than succumbing to deliveries promised in 15 minutes.
You will also be able to reduce the number of times you have to go to the grocery store or order groceries online and hence, this is why you should seriously consider Meal Planning!
With a meal plan in place, you will be able to make more meals at home thereby doing away with the temptation of ordering in/eating out frequently which while being heavy on the pocket is also not great for your health.
A penny saved is a penny earned! And saving on resources is never a bad idea!
Meal planning helps to prevent wastage
When you do Meal Planning, you will be able to estimate exactly what you need to buy and how much you need to cook.
You will also be able to use all that you have bought because everything would have been bought as per plan. There will be no perishables languishing at the back of the refrigerator getting spoilt.
You will also be cooking optimal quantities for each meal and be able to avoid the cooked food going to waste.
You can also incorporate leftovers in your meal plan thus preventing food from going to waste.
Why squander the hard-earned resource when you can save?
It also helps us to eat healthy
When you do Meal Planning, you allow yourself to make healthy food choices for yourself and your family members.
You will be able to create balanced and nutritious meal plans which find favor with everyone’s palates.
Healthy food does not have to be boring or bland. There are a number of ingredients, cooking styles and recipes, which will enable you to make healthy and tasty meals.
Once you decide on your meal plan, you will have time to figure out how to make the meals such that everyone enjoys them.
Having interesting Meal Plans handy also keeps indulgence-driven junk food binging at bay and enables healthy eating.
You can easily ensure a healthy (and tasty) diet for everyone by Meal Planning.
Meal planning helps to include variety in meals
When you are busy, you tend to cook the same dishes in a repeat mode and also use ingredients in the same manner.
Your pre-occupations do not allow you to move away from your comfort zones thus creating monotony around meals.
When you plan your meals, you enable yourself to consider including different ingredients and dishes in your menu.
You can include seasonal produce, cook different recipes and make different dishes.
With Meal planning, you can cook different dishes every day without repetition!
It helps to reduce stress
Everyone is under some stress or the other owing to the multiple responsibilities that one shoulders.
Meal Planning can help one to reduce or even take away the stress coming from the constant and continuous need for deciding meal menus.
Once one knows what is going to get cooked in one’s kitchens for all meals and for the next day or more, one can reasonably relax!
With Meal Planning done, one will neither have to worry about what one is cooking or whether one will have all the required ingredients available and handy!
One will also be able to take care of including all family members’ preferred dishes in the meal plan of few days, create a variety in daily cooking and make interesting meals so no one will have a reason to complain.
Meal Planning is a stress-busting lifestyle choice, worth trying!
Enables efficiency
Meal Planning makes us more efficient in terms of utilization of time and effort. We can plan meals when we are free, buy the groceries according to the plan, and be able to manage other responsibilities ably too.
It will also ensure that we remember everything we had planned for and there will be no slip between the cup and the lip.
Meal Planning makes Cooking and Shopping easier, quicker, and focused and thus making the tasks more efficient.
Meal Planning makes life easy with its efficiency.
Most people think that they do not need Meal Planning. They assume that they are fine and managing to run their kitchens well and feeding their families home-cooked food!
Sure, that is absolutely true! Nobody has ever gone hungry because they were not able to decide what food to cook to feed themselves or their families.
Kitchens are going strong, managing to handle the increased (post-Covid) pressures well, churning out meals more consistently than before.
Businesses are advertising majorly promising delivery of groceries or food in 15 minutes flat!
Ordering from restaurants, eating out, take-away is slowly inching back to their pre-covid levels. Industry experts are talking about how food-related businesses are going to do much better in the post covid world.
Things are looking good and soon the offices and schools will reopen and life will become what it was before the Pandemic hit us.
So where’s the problem then?
Before we go to the problem, let us step back and understand the context.
According to research, Indians spent the most amount of time in the kitchens as compared to anyone where else in the world. And this research is from the pre-covid times. The time spent in the kitchen has only increased in the current circumstances.
We are having more home-cooked food now than ever before.
There are quite a lot of people who have underlying health conditions be it a lifestyle disorder or a genetic predisposition for which they need to be careful. Their daily diets have to take care of these factors.
The first and second waves of Covid have also made us aware of the importance of having a strong immunity. Instead of solely relying on pills, we are counting on our kitchens and coming up with immunity-building concoctions and healthy foods.
Food prices are rising for various reasons. While eating out a few times was always budgeted for, the costs of food for home cooking have also gone up thus putting more pressure on the home budgets.
A lot of people have either lost jobs or taken pay hits and year-end bonuses are a thing of the past for now. Family budgets have taken a huge hit because of Covid.
In a family, each member has a different choice or preference and that has to be factored in when one is planning the daily menus.
The landfills/ garbage collection centers outside most major urban centers are beginning to rival the Himalayas. Food wastage coming from households is a real problem. According to Food Waste Index Report 2021, released by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 50kg of food is wasted per person per year in Indian homes.
With this context in place, we should be conscious of the fact that the increased expectations from the kitchens have put the decision-maker (mostly the lady of the house) under immense pressure. And we must not forget that she is handling a lot of other responsibilities alongside managing this one too.
And that is where the problem lies!
That is some context (and problem) for everyone to mull over and think through, but it must be given serious consideration by all and most importantly by the women themselves!
It is time to see how we can optimize our efforts and relieve ourselves of some stress. Meal Planning is one such activity that we would like you to consider seriously.
Use AMIYAA: What’s Cooking Meal Planning App to help you in this task
Like all new things, this too shall require some discipline, and initially, you will find it challenging and would want to quit and want to fall back to your old ways and pattern.
We would advise you to persevere, for all good habits require patience and time to grow on you.
Once you get used to this, you will be saving a lot of time, resources, and money and also be able to create more interesting and healthy meal plans for your family.
Meal planning is making a plan of meals with optimal nourishment and nutrition for every member of the family within the available resources.
The term ‘available resources’ refers to whatever the family has in terms of time, energy, and money.
Now let us look at this activity holistically & objectively to understand whether we are able to do it justice in the current format of handling the same.
It is only fair to acknowledge the fact that the activity of Meal Planning is an immense responsibility and needs to be done justice to!
While managing our current set of responsibilities, we end up not fully considering the more important parameters and succumb to making choices within our comfort zones. These could be in letting taste score over health, convenience dominate over the need for variety, and limited bandwidth prevail over the actual possibilities.
In such a case, we leave ourselves with little opportunity to do justice to the responsibility of ensuring optimal nutrition for the family while also ensuring that healthy does not become boring!
While we know that we must include a variety in our meals to keep them interesting, we are not able to manage it consistently because of various other pre-occupations. We continue to make dishes the way we have always done and the experimentation and introduction of new dishes are few and far between.
With no/little planning and limited bandwidth, we end up compromising on our health in favor of convenience and often get stuck and resort to
· repetitions of dishes
· fixed menus on certain days of the week/month,
· shortcuts
· and decision fatigue.
All in all, whether or not we acknowledge it, this is a continuous source of stress in our lives! We can laugh it away, joke about it but the stress cannot be done away with so simply!
And it will remain so unless we make a little change in our routines and start with Meal Planning in a bit more organized manner as opposed to shooting from the hip and relying on our limited memory and ability to help us rustle meals which will be enjoyed by everyone!
In reality, healthy food can be made interesting and have variety – it just requires some thought to go into the planning and that is where ‘Meal Planning comes in!
Even though the phrase sounds very formal and daunting, it is what one does every day!
Putting it simply, one is doing meal planning when one answers the daily question of ‘Aaj khane mein kya banana hai / what should I cook today/What is there for breakfast/lunch/dinner? etc’!
Most of you reading this will say- ‘Big deal’!
Actually, it is quite a big deal!
Because when one sets oneself up to answer this question every day, for each meal, there are a lot of things that need to be considered.
As the person in the family who is responsible for deciding what meals to serve every day, one has immense responsibility on one’s shoulders to ensure that the meals:
· are nutritious, healthy,
· are tasty, varied/interesting
· meet the diet requirements
· and preferences of the family members.
And these are just a few of the total set of considerations!
One also has to:
· first figure out the menu for each meal,
· consider the availability of ingredients or organize for the required stuff!
· check out how much time would be required to prepare the said meal vs how much time is available for the job.
This is alongside all the other responsibilities that one is shouldering on an everyday basis!
And this is a repetitive task!
But the challenge is that each time the question remains the same and yet one has to come up with different answers! You cannot have the same answer as yesterday or the day before! You have to think on your feet and be ready to dish out interesting meals each time with or without support!
Whether you are cooking yourself or have a cook, this decision is still steered by you alone!
If you still think that it is not a big deal, then you are seriously undermining your own self and the importance that this activity has of ensuring a healthy status of you and your family members!
