The One Trick to Help You Eat Healthier, Save Time, Cut Down on Your Grocery Bill, and Reduce Food Waste

As humans in a pandemic, we are all looking for ways to make life feel a little easier right now. We’re homeschooling, we’re Zoom fatiguing, and WE.ARE.STRESSED. This calls for figuring out any way to make our days just a liiiiiitle bit easier. What if I told you there was ONE trick that would help you eat healthier, whip up quick supper ideas, bang out easy weeknight dinners, save time, cut down on your grocery bill, cut down on food waste, and, dare I say it, make your life EASIER? 

Yes. It’s possible. Even in a pandemic. 

Here’s the reality: we are tired, we are stretched as thin as can be, and many of us are parenting while pandemicing. So there’s not a lot of mental space these days to stop and think “gee, it's time for dinner... what should we have?...maybe I’ll whip up some roast chicken with a side of mashed cauliflower, and a salad with some homemade vinaigrette.” 

Nopety nope nope nope. 

This is not how our brains are working right now. We want something easy and something now. Most of our dinner thoughts are more along the lines of, “Crap! Its dinner time and I have nothing in the fridge!”

So what’s a time crunched frazzled tired stressed person to do? 

Enter: meal planning. 

Meal planning works because you remove the mental fatigue that is often in play with food choices, which can steer us toward choices that may not serve us well. With meal planning, the decision of what to eat is already made, and hopefully, a few steps taken to make it easier.  

It’s all about ease. Which is something we could all use a little of these days. 

Here’s how to make your life easier with meal planning:

Step 1: Get Clever With Searching

Peruse Pinterest, Google, Instagram, or whatever recipe haven you know of and look for search terms like:

• healthy snacks

• healthy snack prep ideas

• Easy snack ideas

• paleo snack ideas* 

• Whole30 snack ideas *

• Healthy dinners

• Paleo weeknight dinners*

• Easy weeknight dinners

• Quick Whole 30 meals*

• Easy Whole30 dinners*

• Healthy sheetpan dinners (trust me on this one, you’ll thank me later)

*using these search terms tend to weed out recipes with a lot of sugar, refined carbs, lots of dairy, gluten, or other foods that can be inflammatory and nutrient depleting.

Step 2: Make A List

Once you’ve got a list of a few easy snack ideas and easy dinner ideas, make a grocery list of all the ingredients you’ll need. And then:

ONLY BUY THOSE INGREDIENTS.

Don’t fall for the “hmm...well...maybe I’ll just get some chips just in case I want to treat myself/they are on sale/it's been a hard week and I deserve chips” trap. Buying things not on your list adds to our grocery bill and leads to eating off your plan, which leads to food waste. 

Step 3: Meal Prep

Once the groceries are in your house, pull out the recipes you found from your easy meal and easy snacks searches in Step 1 and check for anything that can be prepped. This means washed, chopped, sliced, hardboiling eggs, etc. The more meal prepping you can do upfront, the easier it will be during the week, BUT don’t let this be an all-or-nothing thing. Meal prep what you can- whatever little bit you can do will help make your week easier. 

Step 4: Store It So You Can See It

Place all prepped ingredients in clear glass containers. I like these clear glass containers from Amazon.

For snacks: choose a spot in your door that is your “snack” area. I like to use the bottom shelf in my fridge door (because it’s a high visibility area), but you can use whatever fits your containers. This is where you can keep washed and cut veggies, fruit, hard boiled eggs, etc. Take a look at this amazing snack door for inspiration.  

Both of these tricks keep your food visible, so you won’t forget what you bought and end up finding a moldy bag of peaches in the back of your fridge two weeks after you bought them. 

Step 5: Eat For the Week

Throughout the week, keep the recipes you found handy so you can decide which meal you feel like making. This doesn’t necessarily mean assigning a recipe to each night, but allowing some fluidity for the week by just having 2-4 options to choose from based on how your day is going. Some meals feel like more work than others, and some days we have more energy than others, so it’s helpful to have some flexibility.

Finding healthy meal plans (and healthy snack plans!), meal planning and getting things ready for the week by meal prepping are some of the most profound things you can do to switch into better eating habits. Meal planning for healthy meals removes some big obstacles that can get in our way and allow you more space to choose better. 

Want to remove one more step? At Source + Sprout Nutrition, we offer Personalized Meal Planning and Grocery List as just one of our many services. We do the meal planning work for you! Here’s how it works: Simply purchase the meal planning and grocery list service, let us know your dietary preferences, choose which meals you want (any combo of breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and we’ll choose 5 recipes along with the full list of groceries you’ll need. Click here to find out more!

Got any other tricks to make healthy snacking, meal prepping and meal planning a breeze? Share below! 

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