Benefits of Meal Planning: 7 Positive Perks

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You’ve probably heard it a million times: Meal planning is essential for running a household successfully. (Or some version of that statement:) Maybe you’ve even dabbled in meal planning from time to time when you look at the sale flyer that arrives on Thursday for your local grocery store.

Visions of meal prep and home cooked dinners that the whole family will eat dance in your head. But then you get busy and resort to the old standby of going to the store multiple times a week and grabbing a bunch of groceries. Ones that will later be turned into random meals because you didn’t have all the ingredients on hand to make an actual recipe. The benefits of meal planning actually go beyond what your family eats for dinner every night.

Maybe you actually think that system is working and there’s nothing wrong with it. And who am I to say its not? I have no idea what actually goes on in your house, maybe it is working. However, if you have doubts about your current “non-system”, I encourage you to read on and see what you’re really missing out on by not meal planning.

Eliminates Meal Time Stress from Your Week

When you have a plan for every dinner, you eliminate the 4pm “What should I make for dinner?” stress entirely. By simply writing a plan, checking it in the morning in case you need to pull something out to thaw, you can execute it when you get home from work pretty seamlessly. In my house, I plan our take-out and freezer section meals (such as frozen pizza and bagged salad) too. I don’t wait to not have a clue to play those cards.

When you meal plan, you can choose what nights you need to have a quick meal, such as Turkey Avocado BLT Wraps or the nights you need to do a crockpot meal such as Slow Cooker Chicken Chili. By looking at your schedule and planning meal accordingly, you eliminate the afternoon stress that comes with dinner time. Benefits of meal planning are not only physical, they are mental too! Sometimes the mental ones are the most important.

Saves you Exponentially More Time Than it Requires

You might be thinking that you don’t have time to meal plan. Taking 20 minutes a week or an hour a month might seem like a lot of time to spend when you’re always have so much going on. I get it! There were times when I’d get to the store and meal plan in my car before walking in because I knew if I went in without any plan it would be a catastrophe. So if that’s where you’re at in your life right now, I see you! Plan in the car if that’s all you can manage.

However, I’d love to challenge you to carve out some time in the week to meal plan effectively. Maybe that means waking up 20 minutes earlier or staying up 20 minutes later. Maybe it means throwing a show on for your kids and hiding in your room with a pen and my free meal planning guide. Maybe it means taking an “extra shower” this week and planning in the bathroom. Steam facial and meal planning all in one, now that’s work life balance!

What I think you’ll find is that by spending 20 minutes upfront for the the week, you’ll get back at least an hour of time throughout the week. Instead of making a mid-week trip to the grocery store and sitting in line again, you’ll have all of your ingredients ready to go. Instead of racking your brain while staring at the fridge for what you could make out of its contents, you’ll know exactly what you’re cooking and you’ll be able to get into it quickly. By having a plan, you can determine that you’ll need to chop onions for three meals and get them all chopped on Tuesday if you have a few extra minutes. There are so many pockets of time that can be carved out when you meal plan, it’s truly going to impact your life in a positive way.

Gets Your Family Eating at Home More

A lot of my workshop students have admitted to eating out more than they want to because they didn’t have a plan in place. Chipotle, Wendy’s and KFC runs were very much the norm before they started meal planning consistently. I get it! When it’s 5:30pm and you just picked the kids up from ballet and you know you don’t have anything that can be made into dinner, driving through Mickey D’s is the only option. If you want to eat more home cooked meals liked you planned to in 2019, you gotta plan!

Using my 7 Keys to Successful Meal Planning, you can get a very easy to implement plan in place. I don’t suggest making food from scratch 7 nights a week. Eating at home doesn’t mean slaving in the kitchen for hours every night. Who has time for that?! Not me! It just means making a plan. Cooking a few nights and then eating leftovers. Making a crockpot meal once a week or having breakfast for dinner. You can eat quickly but still eat at home by meal planning. These benefits of meal planning all come together to make a much happier house that isn’t so stressed out all the time.

More Quality Family Time

If you’re anything like me you worry a lot about screen time and all of its repercussions. We can’t be perfect but one easy way I’ve seen reducing screen time naturally is family dinner. 3-4 nights a week my family eats together and chats about our day. We use the rose analogy to get everyone talking. Meal planning makes this possible. If you aren’t worried about scrounging up a meal with the random stuff you bought, you can get dinner on the table quicker and with less hostility. You can make dinner and serve it at a reasonable hour so the whole family can eat and chat and spend some time together.

We have a “no phones at dinner” rule but my kids are 4 and 18 months so it’s easy to stick to. If you have older kids, you might face some resistance at first but if you’re consistent the habit will stick. If you’re family never eats together, start with doing it once a week. Then bump it up to twice a week and so on until you’re at about 4 nights a week consistently. The other nights let your family eat wherever, while doing whatever. Remember, we’re not looking for perfection were looking for progress.

Less Food Waste

Do you throw a lot of food away every week and then feel super guilty about it? No judgement from me, I used to throw an exorbitant amount of food away. It was shameful. Then I started meal planning and being realistic about how much my family would eat in a week and it drastically cut the amount of food we waste now. When you meal plan and write a grocery lost before hitting the store, you don’t buy more than you need for the given time period. Well usually, lol!

Having a plan in place will get you to logically look at what you need for the week and write your list accordingly. When you meal plan, you can write out how much fruit you’ll need for the week instead of just throwing stuff into your cart. Instead of grabbing all sorts of fruits and veggies on a whim, take 20 minutes to write a meal plan this week.

• Check on what you currently have in the fridge that needs to be used up and plan meals around those items for the beginning of the week.
• Then write down the items you need to get this week and don’t get anything else! As tempting as it is once you get in the store, try not and deviate from your list. This is exactly why I’m using Instacart exclusively these days and still saving money.
• Don’t add more than your family can actually eat in a week. Grab frozen veggies and fruits if you think you might run out of fresh ones.

By meal planning and sticking to your list you will greatly reduce the amount of food you waste. Imagine how good you’ll feel when you stop throwing out all that food you paid good money for. The benefits of meal planning go way beyond feed your family dinner, they help reduce waste and save you money!

Saves Money (need I say more?!)

Speaking of saving money, you’ll save a lot of it by meal planning. As I stated above, with a plan in place you’ll buy less of what you don’t need and actually eat what you do buy. That will save you a decent chunk of change every week. On top of that, you will be eating our way less and that will save you money.

Tally up what you spent on fast food, take-out and going to restaurants last week. Seriously! Go through your bank app on your phone really quick and see how much you spent. Not trying to brow beat you, I just want you to actually see how much you’re spending. I’ve been there myself. Lunches here and there, lots of weekend treats and a few date nights really add up. I recently told my husband we were killing our budget with a thousand paper cuts. When you meal plan, including the weekend, you eat out so much less.

Does my family still eat out? Of course! But we try to limit it to one lunch and one dinner a week. Sure things come up and we don’t always follow that perfectly but overall we are eating out far less than we used to. We’re saving $100-200 a week by meal planning, cooking most dinners at home and packing our lunch. It’s a little more time-consuming but its healthier and still easy enough to implement using my 7 Keys to Successful Meal Planning below. Grab your FREE copy before you leave!

Grocery Delivery or Pick-Up Services are Easy to Implement

Have you ever tried a grocery delivery or pick-up service? If you  answered no, I beg you to try it out. Instacart is my service of choice and I’ve tried several. Ultimately, I went with Instacart after price comparing a week’s worth of groceries from Peapod, Aldi using Instacart and Mariano’s using Clicklist. Sure, there a few things that Aldi doesn’t carry but if you use Instacart, you can get groceries from any store they support. So every once in awhile, I will get stuff delivered from Mariano’s via Instacart. If you guys would like a full tutorial on how to use Instacart and place an order, let me know in the comment below! I’d be happy to do that if there is interest.

If you make a meal plan and write your shopping list first, putting your list into an online grocery delivery app is quick and easy. As tempting as it is, I’d urge you not to skip the step of writing your grocery list when using a grocery delivery or pick-up service. Mainly because you can still forget stuff or over order. Once you start poking around it’s easy to grab extras. Case in point, I did just that a few weeks ago. I had my meal plan all done because I’ve been doing them monthly so I thought I’d skip a step and just look at it while I made my list on Instacart. Well $35 over budget and a few missing ingredients and I won’t make that mistake again, lol! The benefits of meal planning and then sticking to a list will ALWAYS save you money.

Meal plan, write your list and input it quickly into your favorite delivery service this week and tell me how it goes. Most services will give you the first delivery free or a dollar amount off. You can use code TCONWELL1A01EC on Instacart to get $10 off your first order and I’ll get $10 off too! But rest assured, I will continue to use Instacart every week because I truly love it and use it, so I’m not just peddling my referral code for free stuff.

So there you have it, all the benefits of meal planning laid out so you can take stock and see if investing 20 minutes a week into it will benefit your family. Truly, I’m not being facetious. Maybe these benefits of meal planning don’t really appeal to you and your family. In that case, thank you so much for reading this post Kimmy K! Kidding, sort of. Overall, I’d love if you would download my free meal planning guide and give meal planning a try for one month. Then report back to me. If you’re struggling I’d love to help you so feel free to comment below and we can chat. I want all of my readers to enjoy meal time a little bit more by making it less stressful with easy meal planning.