On a beautiful Saturday evening, while walking with my friend, I asked if she had ever set up a meal plan for her family.
She answered jokingly: “I’ve got my meal plan for my weight loss. I hope you don’t mean making a meal plan for my five-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter?”
For most people, meal planning involves a strict diet for health, weight loss, or to avoid allergens. These meal plans are set up to meet a specific target, and strict adherence is crucial. In most cases, it is necessary to prepare all the meals at home. For these reasons, a lot of us are put off.
However, that is not always the case. It is not always about maintaining a strict diet, and your meal plan may include eating in or eating out.
In the real sense, meal planning should enable us to meet the total daily requirement for micro and macro nutrients that our body needs to thrive. By being organised, we can avoid too many of the toxic substances often present in ultra-processed foods, as we do not always have to settle for the last-minute options.
Various research has shown that consumption of ultra-processed foods negatively impacts the body’s metabolism, leading to poor health conditions especially noncommunicable diseases such as cancer and diabetes.
When cooking at home, planning ahead allows us to choose quality food produce from local food producers, supporting them to opt for sustainable practices. This means more access to diverse and seasonal food produce, enabling us to get the nutrients we need. Improving our health while restoring our environment – a win, win, win for everyone.
In the face of recession and a cost-of-living crisis, it is helpful to know that meal planning can provide massive savings, especially when ingredients are bought in bulk. This drives down the cost of feeding yourself and your family.
Meal planning also helps to reduce food waste, as we shop based on the items needed, rather than making sporadic purchases based on offers, only to realise on getting home that we do not know what to do with them.
Preparing meals in bulk at one time reduces your energy cost when compared to cooking from scratch every night. With portions packed neatly in the fridge or freezer, you can easily and quickly reheat them as needed.
When it comes to eating in restaurants, office canteens or school dinner halls, meal planning allows those businesses and institutions to organise their food preparation, as well as prioritise sourcing their ingredients from sustainable producers. It is reassuring to know we are getting the best value from our food, whether we are eating out or eating in.
Sounds simple? Yes, in theory, though maybe not in reality. With a very busy schedule, meal planning will often fall to the bottom of our to-do lists.
An easy way to go about setting up your first meal plan is simply to start noting what you eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner for four weeks. Hooray – that’s your monthly meal plan developed without any hassle.
The next step is to check if what you’re eating is helping you to meet your daily nutritional requirements. Food Standards Scotland’s Eatwell Guide, available online, is a very useful reference guide, and you can get further information about meal planning from my organisation IntelliDigest’s website.
Once you are sure your meal plan is giving you everything you need nutritionally, each weekly plan can be repeated the next month, or reshuffled as necessary.
Note: Article originally published in The Press and Journal on June 17, 2024, refer to featured image.