One of the critical steps in keeping fit is menu planning. Menu planning is essential to eat healthy, tasty, and diverse meals. When combined with grocery shopping planning, it is also cost-effective.
I started menu planning seven years ago when I introduced The Smart Dad Diet. Of course, I had done sort of meal planning on previous diets, but not systematically. At that time, we stopped eating certain things and simply replaced the food in our pantry. We didn’t have children yet, so we didn’t need to think about meals for them either.
The video story (if you prefer to read the story, please continue below the video):
But when we started the Smart Dad Diet, we made menu planning systematic. Breakfast, snacks, and dinner are standardized and don’t require planning, but we plan lunch as the main meal for the whole week. We prepare two menus for each day, one for us and one for the children. The kids’ & diet menus are often similar; the only difference is the side dishes (vegetables for us and potatoes or pasta for the children). Still, sometimes, the two menus are entirely different.
Technically, the solution is simple – an MS Office table with a space for the menu and the ingredients gathered, simplifying shopping, which I will write about in a future post. You may notice that not all the ingredients are listed – at first, all of them were, but over time, I have simplified the preparation and only listed the food that we don’t have in stock but need to buy separately. So you won’t find salt, sugar, potatoes, onions, eggs, breadcrumbs, flour, and so on among the ingredients.
It takes me about 15 minutes a week to prepare the menu. I once played with the idea of having about ten standard weekly menus and just having to choose one of them each week. But I haven’t gotten to that stage yet, so I still prepare a unique menu each week – I usually open one of the last ones and adapt it.
Preparing the weekly menu is absolutely essential in my fight with overweight and is one of the activities I am very persistent about. Since 2016, apart from holidays or more than a week’s trips, I have never failed to prepare a menu.
If you are interested in reading more, stay tuned!