Tips on Meal Planning

Hey everyone! I hope you’re doing well with your New Year’s resolutions. Keep up the good work – I know it is hard, but you can do it!!

This Week’s Tip is: Meal Planning – In order to eat Healthy and to have 5 to 6 meals a day you need to Plan, Plan, Plan! Avoiding treats is far easier if you have a plan!

To start begin by knowing what you eat in a day. For that you will need a food journal to determine what can be added or improved upon. After awhile you won ‘t need this but with every plan you need a start and knowing what you are currently doing is the best start.

In most books and in accordance with the Canadian Food Guide (and the US Food Guide) they talk about meals being:

• 200 to 300 calories
• Meals with foods from each food group
• Snacks with foods from two food groups
  
• Plenty of vegetables, fruits and whole grains
• 2 glasses of milk per day
• Fish dishes twice weekly
• Bean & Lentil Dishes often    

Sounds easy…  but it ‘s not. It takes time, time, time but like the old saying: “A stitch in time saves nine”. Taking the time to plan out your food means you’ll eat healthier, and eating healthy means you’ll live LONGER! You really need to find what works for you. I don ‘t like counting calories – I find it confusing and too time consuming, which is why a great app to use for Meal Planning is MealPlan Meal and Grocery Planner. Thanks to an easy-to-navigate interface where you drag and drop recipes (or keywords like “burgers” and “salad”) into a home screen organized by meal, this app is great for disorganized dieters who need a simple way to map out their weekly diet, sans all the crazy bells and whistles. Once completed, you can email or print out the generated grocery list (sorted by aisle — so helpful).

Another tip is to use a Food Journals app. You can enter in the foods you PLAN to eat ahead of time. That way you can see where your diet is lacking and make adjustments BEFORE you eat it. You can easily remove the foods you didn’t eat, and add the foods you ate instead. This way you can tackle two birds with one stone – plan out your meals while journaling your food.

Here ‘s another meal planning tip from Dr. Mirkin, which I think has the easiest approach: Eat a variety of Colours in your food and do so with portion control.

Do you know of any other Menu Planning Tools to use? If so, leave a link to it in the comments below!