Meal Planning & Grocery Shopping

I think that meal planning is crucial to eating healthy.  If I don’t plan out my meals and shop accordingly, I always feel like I have no food in my house and end up eating out. However, I often have cravings or don’t feel like eating a particular food on any given day.  I like to make sure that I eat food that tastes good and rarely force myself to eat something I don’t feel like. The exception being vegetables.  Most of the time my veggies taste great but every once in a while they just don’t sound all that appetizing, but I eat them anyway. They are good for me and fill me up for very little calories. How did I end up talking about eating veggies? Oh yeah, because I like to make sure I have options throughout the week, SO…back to how I plan my meals.

I don’t plan specific meals for each day but instead I just write out 5 dinner ideas.  This way I can decide what sounds good each day and I know I will have the ingredients on hand. I only plan 5 dinners instead of 7 because we usually eat out once a week and have leftovers once a week. I find if I plan more than that, we end up wasting food. I don’t plan specific breakfasts or lunches.  I make sure I have staples for these meals like oats, cereal, milk, eggs, bread, flour, nut butter, lunch meat, beans, and so on. Breakfast is usually on the go and I either make eggs and toast or some variation of oatmeal. Lunch is either leftovers from dinner the night before, or a sandwich, or burrito. We always have tons of cut up fruit and fresh veggies and eat these with our meals and as snacks. I keep a white board in my kitchen with a list of the dinners for the week and I use it to make a list of items as we run out of them.

At the beginning of the week, usually on Sunday, I sit down and plan out all my dinners for the week. Then I make my grocery list. I make my list on the computer and have 5 columns: produce, dry/canned, dairy, meat, and frozen.  This takes a little more forethought while writing out my list but decreases my time in the grocery store. I’m usually shopping with 2 kids so speed is crucial. We need to get in and out before the kids melt down and without buying all the cookies and fruit snacks in the store. Why must they put all those things within kids’ reach? I swear they are just trying to make grocery shopping harder for moms!

This is what my list generally looks like:

• Stir Fry
• Spaghetti w/ turkey sauce
• Chicken Taco Salad
• Ann’s Frito Casserole
• Chicken Sausage and Quinoa
• Black Bean Enchiladas

Produce	Dry/Canned	Dairy	Meat	Frozen
Baby Spring Mix	Beans	Parmesan cheese	3 lbs. chicken breast	Stir Fry Veggies
Romaine	Wheat Germ	Low Fat Cheddar	Ground Turkey	Ezekiel Bread
Bell peppers	Chex Cereal	Skim Milk	Chicken Sausage	Chicken Tenders
Zucchini	Protein Powder	2% Milk	Ground Beef
Mushrooms	Taco Seasoning x2	Whole Milk	Bacon
Green Beans	Spaghetti Sauce	Almond Milk
Broccoli	English Muffins	Plain Greek Yogurt
Berries	Fritos
Grapes	Olives
Bananas	Almond Butter
Cantaloupe	Chia Seeds
Pineapple	Brown Rice
Green Onion
Lime x2
Cilantro
Lemon
Apples

Yes there are 4 members of our family and we buy 4 different kinds of milk.  The Big One is allergic to dairy so we buy almond milk for him.  The Little One drinks whole milk; he still needs the extra fat for brain development. Kelly prefers 2% and I drink skim because that is what I grew up on and everything else is gross!

I very rarely buy things that are not on my list.  I can’t have sweets and junk food in the house or I will eat the whole bag, jar, container, etc.  I do much better when I go out to get a sweet treat on occasion.

And there you have it.  Meal planning for dummies.

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Do you bring a list with you to the grocery store or do you prefer to wing it?