Meal Planning: How It Helps Conserve Mental Energy

"What's for dinner?"

It's a question we're expected to have the answer for daily. Mealtimes have been a struggle for me my whole life. I am a very picky eater, always have been. I can remember the tears and battles my parents and I had at dinner time from a very young age. Now, as an adult, any uncertainty regarding food triggers my anxiety.

Trying new restaurants really stresses me out (thankfully most have their menus listed online now so I can head in prepared.) Unfortunately, there is no pre-determined menu for me to research when choosing what meals to have at home. The possibilities are endless, which then sets off another part of my anxiety; making decisions.

Letting go of "perfect"

As you can imagine, the idea of meal planning sounded dreadful to me. Any time I would look it up the results always came back full of people who plan out a full month of Betty Crocker style healthy meals. If that works for you and your family I am happy for you, truly! But, I struggle to come up with just ONE dinner each night, and now you expect me to plan out an entire month's worth?! No thank you!

Perfectionism has always had a hold on me. My mentality was always "If I can't do it right, it's not worth doing." Here's the thing though, doing it "right" doesn't mean being perfect. When it came to meal planning, I had to find the method that was going to work best for the person I actually am, not the person I thought I "should" be.

Here's my reality: I will never be that mom who has a perfectly balanced meal ready to go each night. Pizza, chicken nuggets, Kraft mac & cheese, hot dogs, these are all things that appear on our menu regularly. At the end of the day, what's important is that my family is fed. Done is better than perfect.

Over the past month, I've kept this new philosophy in mind as I began meal planning each week (because the thought of planning out a whole month stresses your girl out!) Here's what I've learned so far:

Grocery shopping is faster & easier

I don't know about you, but grocery shopping for me used to be a bit of an overwhelming nightmare. Sure I would try to go in with a list, but it was inevitable that something would get forgotten, either because I didn't actually look at the list while we were in the store, or because the thing never even made it onto the list in the first place. I would end up wandering the aisles, aimlessly grabbing random things, only to get home and realize I somehow still managed to be missing key ingredients needed to make dinner.

Since I've started planning out our meals each week, the ingredients basically become my shopping list. I'll check the kitchen to see what we already have, and anything we don't have gets put on the list. Then, since I'm looking at what we have anyway, I can add staples we're running low on while I'm at it. I'm notorious for not realizing we're almost out of things like bread, eggs, milk, butter, until all of a sudden I'm using the last of it.

After I've gone through the kitchen items, I've even started taking a weekly inventory of other things around the house like dog food, toilet paper, laundry detergent, or personal care items. If I notice something is less than half empty, it gets added to the list. I think I've only had to go back to the store between grocery days once this month, which is a HUGE win for me!

The plan is easily adaptable

Life happens. Sometimes, what I have planned for certain days needs switching around. Because I have groceries bought for the whole week, I can just look at the upcoming meals, and swap days if I have to. Some nights, we even decide we would rather order in. In that case, the meal that was initially planned just gets bumped to the next week, which works out nicely because that means less groceries we need to buy next grocery day, since we already have those ingredients.

This kind of structured flexibility really helps to put my anxiety at ease. It's comforting to have a plan in place, even if we don't always follow that plan exactly. I always have an answer when someone asks "What's for dinner?" and if my answer is unsatisfactory, I can come up with an alternative much more easily now.

I can keep track of leftovers

It's happened time and time again. Once leftovers get put into the fridge, it's like they've been sucked into a black-hole, never to be seen again, until you pull them out and have to ask yourself "how long has this been in here?" Or worse, it's already starting to look like a science experiment...no judgment, I've been there too!

I do my meal planning digitally (and then transfer to a white board, but we'll talk more about that farther down.) Anyway, because it's in digital form, it's really easy for me to scroll through past weeks to see when I made something last.

Not only does this give me inspiration for planning future meals, but it comes in extra handy when I have left overs in the fridge, but can't remember how long they've been in there. Typically, if it's sat there for more than a week, I'll go ahead and throw it out. If not, I'll have it for lunch one day just to get it used up, or maybe plan to have a leftover night for dinner.

My meal planning process

Honestly, the way I go about this is pretty simple. As I talked about in my cleaning routine post, Wednesdays are grocery days, and weekly prep day is Friday. So every Friday, I sit down and plan meals from Thursday to Wednesday for the following week.

We do our grocery shopping late in the afternoon, so I like to plan a crock pot meal for Wednesday nights. This way, I don't have to worry about cooking after getting home and putting all the groceries away, because grocery shopping with two kids is exhausting, and the last thing I want to do when we finally get home is cook!

Since I already know Wednesday night is going to be a crock pot meal, I usually start there. Then, I just work the week backwards, until I have the whole week planned out.

Deciding what to put on the menu

I am a very indecisive person, so honestly this is the most difficult part of this whole process for me. Pinterest and my calendar app are my best friends when I'm looking for things to make.

I feel like Pinterest is a pretty common place for people to get meal ideas, but it can be a little overwhelming at times. There are a TON of recipes on there, and it can be easy to fall into a research rabbit hole. Usually, I'll pull maybe one or two new ideas from Pinterest, then the rest of the week, I like to look back on previous weeks and pull ideas from things we've done in the past.

The calendar app I use on my phone has a section built in each week where you can plan out your meals. It's really convenient being able to see our weekly schedule on the same page as where I'm planning out meals. I can see what we have going on and make a judgment call as to what meals will work best for which nights.

*Disclaimer* it is a paid app, but it's less than $5/month which is well worth it to me. Also, I do not make any money if you decide to use it, I just really like this app!

Once I have all my meals planned out in the app, I then copy it onto our meal board in the kitchen. This way, the whole family can see for themselves what's on the menu. Granted, my children can't really read it yet, but it's nice for those of us who can.

As you can see, I usually only plan out dinners. Breakfast and Lunch says "FFYS" most days, which is my abbreviation for "Fend For Your Self" basically, these meals are a free for all. Occasionally, we'll actually have something planned, but for the most part we just make whatever we have on hand.

It's not super pretty or aesthetic, but it is functional, and serves our family well. Honestly, this menu board will probably make the health nuts cringe, but this is what I've found works best to conserve my mental energy.

Having quick, easy, comfort meals planned out each week, leaves more room in my brain for other things; like reading with my kids at bedtime or *ahem* writing a blog post. When I'm not constantly stressing over what we're going to eat, I have more energy to focus on the things I love.

If you've read this far, I appreciate you! I hope this post gave you the glimmer of hope you needed to start your own imperfect meal planning journey. My best advice, as always, is to do what works best for you, no matter what that looks like.

Xoxo, Terrin💗