It’s 6pm, you’ve just got home from work and are about to make your evening meal, you look in the fridge and find some mince and a pepper and decide to make a chilli.
You open the cupboard, grab the kidney beans, and then realise you’ve run out of chopped tomatoes.
The chilli you planned on making is no more, you don’t have the energy to go shopping so you reach for your phone and order a takeaway.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Effective meal planning can make eating healthier easier, save money, time and reduce food waste.
Read on for some meal planning tips.
Plan in advance
Planning your meals in advance is one of the most effective things you can do to make sure you eat a healthy, nutritionally balanced diet.
Seeing your week’s food together in one place can help you identify anything you might be missing.
For example, you may notice you haven’t included your two portions of oily fish and can re-design your meals to incorporate them.
A shopping list is key
Once you have your meal plan, you can get to work creating your shopping list. It’s wise to do this in your kitchen so you can check what staples you have in as you go.
If you find this task boring and time consuming, try creating a list of weekly staples that you can reuse each week.
You can always cross things off you don’t need that week but it can save time to have a master list and then add things to it based on what meals you’ve planned.
Utilise your freezer
Plans can change and using the freezer wisely can help. Take stock of your fridge every few days and freeze anything you’ve not ended up using.
You can always cook meals you haven’t used and freeze them for a convenient meal another day. It’s a good idea to have some basics in the freezer like frozen vegetables and cook-from-frozen fish.
With basics like rice and pasta in the cupboard you can make unplanned meals easily.
For more tips on how to stay healthy, sign up for our weekly healthy tips at www.heartresearch.org.uk/healthy-tips
