Meal Planning

Benjamin Franklin once said, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."

Proverbs 21:5 says, "The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty."

Failure to have a meal plan is the number one reason for straying from healthy eating. It is also a huge budget sucker. What happens when you don't have a plan? My kids have to be at theater for two hours over dinner. OK, we'll just drive through this fast food place. The healthy dinner you could've made at home for $3/serving, becomes empty calories for $8/serving. Oh, we have a softball game tonight. We'll just eat at the ball park.

On the other hand, when you have a plan, you can eat clean every day. You can cut up things in advance. You can make meals and put them in the freezer to cook quickly. The crock pot is a huge time saver, but you have to plan in advance. There are many websites to help with meal planning.

Day 2 of organizing was devoted to meal planning. It's going to take a couple more days to get the whole month completed. After several hours, I only ended up with a week's plan. Then, we had to shop. By getting the month planned out, I can also plan ahead and order veggies from the organic co-op. That also saves money and time at the store. The other advantage is that once I have a month's plan, I can recycle it every month. We tend to eat the same things a lot anyway. That will save more time. I did manage to fill up another trash bag and get it out of the house too. Making progress little by little.