Meal Planning & Preparation Will Save You.

This one strategy will save you time & time again. Really, do it!

The best way to slimness is consistently healthy eating, exercise and thinking, and the best way to do anything consistently is to plan it and make it so easy it is inevitable.

These days our lives often seem to be getting busier and busier, but you can save time and ensure your weight loss or slimness when you plan, prepare and cultivate efficiency in every act. Make the efficient habits that will lead to slimness so ingrained in you that you can’t not do them. And then as you live like a slim, healthy, fit person, so you will be a slim, healthy, fit person!

Meal planning strategy step by step.

Here are some action, planning and preparation strategies that will really help to make becoming slim so easy it’s a no-brainer!

• Plan your meals for the week on a Saturday or Sunday.
• Plan to eat the same healthy breakfast each morning all week, the same lunch, and two to three snacks for in between. Every day for one week you eat the same thing except dinner.
• Plan different healthy dinners that will keep your family happy and your waistline intact. Include lots of vegetables in each meal.
• If you live by yourself and don’t mind, you can eat the same dinner too!
• Type your shopping list up in the same document as your meal plan so you can use it again in a month or so. Check you have lots of different sized tupperware containers with tight seals for your prepared food. If not, add them to your list.
• Go buy your food for the week.
• Come home and unpack it all.
• Chop the vegetables as you need for your weeks meals.
• Cook one large easily reheatable meal like a soup, frittata, quiche or some other vegetable & meat dish that can be easily used for dinner if you get very busy.
• Chop up a large green salad for your lunches for the week. Don’t add dressing, keep it dry. If you have lots of wet salad ingredients like tomatos or cucumber, chop up 2-3 days worth and keep it separately in a tupperware container. Your green salad will stay fresh for the week if it is dry.
• Prepare and  pre-make your snacks. eg: chop carrot & celery & capsicum for veggie stick snacks.
• Each night as you’re cooking dinner, or in the morning, combine & pack your days worth of food. Add your salad to your lunch container and add in dressing and chicken, tuna, tofu, etc.

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Prior Preparation and Planning makes it EASY.

Make it so easy to eat healthy through the busy week that you’d be crazy not to eat the lovely food you’ve prepared. Do not leave it to chance that you will eat healthy, make it a certainty. If you make your days’ healthy eating so easy, it will be a cinch to do it.

Now just because you are eating the same meal plan does not mean it has to be a boring day’s food. Make it delicious and healthy, something you love to eat each day. Look after your taste buds too, if you know you like chocolate, (like me) plan into your day one snack like 2 squares dark chocolate, some nuts and a few dried apricots, or a chocolatey dessert protein shake. If you’re counting calories it’s much easier to just count it once then keep your portion sizes the same each day.

And, if you think you’d go nuts eating the same thing, you might be surprised how much you already eat the same kind of things day after day anyway. You can either make two meal plans and rotate them, or  just give yourself a bit more variety in the way you use your preparation. Maybe you make a chicken salad one day, and a turkey salad wrap the next. Use your ingenuity to create variety within the boundaries of  your week. Then the next week you can create completely different meal plan.

Time well spent.

This all takes an absolute maximum of 5 hours, including the time to plan, shop, unpack, chop and cook these preparation foods. This is time that is well spent each week and will bring you closer to slimness each time you do it. You are investing in your health, sanity and slimness each time you do this. It doesn’t matter so much when you do it as that you pick a day that works for you and do it every week on this day.

You will also find that you are much less likely to waste food having planned each meal. Getting ready in the morning is so easy when preparing your food for the day only takes 5 minutes.

More time to exercise and to think of other things.

Most importantly you have so much more thought energy available when you are not thinking ‘what can I have for lunch?’, ‘there’s nothing healthy here.’ or ‘oh I’ve missed my snacks today’ ,’what am I going to eat? I’m starving!’

All that time that you usually spend during the week getting your food can now be better spent in your daily activity!

When you consistently eat well your energy will increase. When you pre-plan and prepare you feel really good about yourself, calm and happy, because you’ve got the week off on the right foot.  Meal planning is a task that is important and but not urgent; the key efficiency category Stephen Covey talks about in his time management book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.

All it takes for a full healthy week of slimness is a few hours at a set time each week preparing the week. My point in suggesting eating the same thing is simply to make it easy. Though there also has been a recent study that shows less variety in food leads to habituation and then you are less likely to overeat because you know you’ve got the same delicious thing to enjoy the next day.

Either way, whether you choose to have the same meal plan each day for the week or not, planning your meals, shopping and spending a few hours on food prep each week will give you a flat tummy faster than any amount of crunches will.