Last week I gave you 3 Back to School Tips to Keep You Healthy. Meal planning was one of them.  Whenever I am helping someone lose weight and get fit, I always ask them to make a meal plan.

Why Meal Plan?

Meal planning helps you to plan for your fitness success.  If you fail to plan, in essence you really are planning to fail.  When you make a meal plan you are setting yourself up in advance to eat delicious, healthy, and affordable meals.  Planning ahead helps you to make sure you fit in all your fruit and veggies for the day.  It helps you to choose in advance healthy protein options. You can also plan your snacks to ensure that you are eating healthy balanced snacks and not high sugar, high calorie snacks.  Meal planning also takes the guesswork out so that you won’t have to ask “What’s for dinner?” at 6pm because you’ll already know.

Less Stress!

Meal planning helps me to stress less. After the 20 minutes or so that it takes me to meal plan all of my meals for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for the week I can relax knowing that I will be eating healthy choices for EVERY meal.  I plan in a way that works to my advantage.  For my family, Tuesday is the busiest day of the week.  My son has a debate and persuasive speech class out of the home, later my daughter has her music class, then her dance class.  After dance class we are off to my son’s swim team practice, then we have 1 hour before Boy Scouts.  And, of course we homeschool all day in between and around all of the above!! So I know what busy looks like!  On Tuesday, I know that I must prepare a quick healthy meal. I like to do something fast like bean, rice, and cheese burritos or I throw something in the slow cooker in the morning. If I didn’t plan ahead Tuesday could be the most unsuccessful day of the week when it comes to eating right. I know that we would eat fast food, or take out on those days if I didn’t plan. I do NOT want to run through a fast food place because I only have about 45 minutes to prepare something. Instead we can have a leftover buffet, or like I said an easy homemade BRC burrito, a big taco salad, or even a store bought natural rotisserie chicken and fresh steamed veggies.  There are many things that can be made in just as much time as it takes you to hop in the car, drive to a fast food place, order it and get it home.

“If you plan to succeed taking into account your schedule, you will eat healthy meals, be less stressed, and happy that you took the time to plan ahead.”

2 Reasons People Do Not Meal Plan

There are usually two reasons people don’t meal plan. They don’t know how to meal plan. Or, they are too lazy to meal plan.  I’m here to help you with the first reason. I will be giving you some meal planning tips. And, if you are the person who is just too lazy to meal plan then you are going to have to deal with yourself on that one.

There are many different ways to meal plan.  This week I’ll post different ways for you to make a meal plan (meal plan templates if you will). Come back tomorrow for the first way! It’s one of my family’s favorite ways to meal plan.

Do YOU meal plan?

Annett Davis, Olympian & Founder of Fit Moms Fit Kids