Whether you’re trying to improve your eating habits, lose weight, or tighten your budget, meal planning is a great way to help you reach your goals. Meal planning is the act of outlining all your meals for the week ahead of time – this involves deciding what to cook and listing out all the ingredients you’d need for every day of the week.
There are many excellent benefits of meal planning, including cutting down on grocery bills, reducing food waste, and more. Below, we listed 5 benefits of meal planning and reasons why you should give it a try:
Time-Saver
Meal planning will save you plenty of time because you’ll go straight to all the ingredients you need to grab and won’t spend extra time aimlessly browsing through the aisles of your grocery store.
Saves Money
By planning your meals in advance, it’ll allow you to buy the right amount of ingredients, thereby leading to less food waste. Also, since meal planning makes you create a definitive grocery list with what you need to get for the week, it can prevent you from impulsive spending on unnecessary items that weren’t originally on your list.
Eat Healthier
Planning out your meals will give you the chance to add lots of healthy fruits and vegetables to the menu. With meal planning, you’ll be in full control of what ingredients are put into your meals instead of opting for takeout or reheating packets of frozen food.
Portion Control
Planning your meals in advance can also help with weight loss goals. Preplanning meal portions will make you less likely to overeat since you’ll list out and see everything you’re actually eating.
Reduces Mealtime Stress
You no longer have to worry about what’s for dinner everyday when you’ve already planned everything out ahead of time. Meal planning will also prevent you from having to make tiresome last-minute trips to the grocery store for when it’s time to cook dinner but you’ve just realized you’ve run out of your key ingredient.