Making a healthy meal can be daunting when juggling work, family, and social commitments. It becomes too difficult to come home and plan a healthy meal after an exhausting day. So, more often than not, you will rely on takeout. At times like these, planning your meal ahead of time comes in handy.

Planning your meal saves you time and money while giving you more control over food. By giving yourself enough time to plan and prepare a meal, you can ensure that everyone in the family eats healthy while fulfilling their dietary requirements.

Some other benefits of healthy meal planning are that it can help you lead a healthy life and aids you in losing weight. In addition, it reduces the stress of last-minute meal planning, improving your mental health.

Planning a whole week’s worth of food can seem intimidating, but you don’t need to remodel your entire kitchen to achieve that. Instead, you need essential tools like food storage containers, a lunch box, a healthy meal planning journal, or a healthy meal plan app such as Lasta that helps you stay organized and makes it easier to keep track of your meals.

While meal planning doesn’t have to be a structured task, you still must abide by some rules to plan a healthy meal. Let’s see what they are.

Principles of Meal Planning

Often while meal planning, people think about the quantity of the food rather than the quality, which, in hindsight, is never beneficial. To plan a healthy meal, you should follow these principles.

1) Nutrition

One of the essentials while planning a meal is keeping your and even your family member’s nutritional needs in mind if you are planning for them as well. This will help choose foods from each food group when planning a healthy meal and ensure their nutritional levels are balanced.

2) Variety

By including foods from different food groups in a meal, you are introducing a variety of textures and recipes while maintaining the nutritional balance. Even your taste buds will thank you for incorporating different foods into a meal, and you won’t have to be stuck eating the same kind of food every day.

3) Moderation

Practicing moderation while planning a meal is crucial as it helps you avoid overeating. Even though meal planning does not involve giving up on your comfort food, you still need to know when to say “that’s enough” to ensure that all the progress you have made and the weight you have lost doesn’t go to waste.

While these are some of the rules that you must follow when preparing a meal, there are other factors that you should consider before even making a meal plan for the whole week.

Factors to Consider Before Planning A Meal

When you plan a last-minute meal, you don’t consider making it from scratch; instead, you use a boxed meal which might be an unhealthy choice. This can be avoided by creating a meal plan for the whole week, making you more likely to cook your meals from scratch and use healthy ingredients. So, to do that, here are some factors to keep in mind that will aid you in making a healthy meal plan.

• Look at your schedule and determine whether you will have the time to cook fancy meals. If you don’t, you can either cook a small meal or prepare a meal in advance and reheat it when you feel hungry.
• If you are confused about how to make a meal plan, you can start by checking the availability of seasonal foods and picking one to plan your meals around. This will allow you to enjoy seasonal foods while being conscious of your wallet, as they are budget-friendly.
• Check your calendar to see whether you have any special occasions that week which will alter your meal plans. For instance, if you have a birthday party, you must bake a cake and prepare a meal plan. Doing this before the occasion will help relieve the stress of running around to buy ingredients on that day.

The Takeaway

Planning a healthy meal can help save time and energy, along with managing your finances. In addition, it can help reduce stress and aid in weight loss. But this is only possible by staying organized, being consistent, and having a positive mindset about meal planning. Lasta, a psychology-based weight loss app, can help you do all that and more, with its exceptional meal planning features.