Building Healthy Weekly Menus
Are you making weekly or monthly menu plans? Your family will eat healthier and your limited time can be spent cooking, instead of wondering what to cook. A monthly plan might be too hard, so let’s take a look at creating a weekly menu. It was a difficult transition for me in the beginning; I thought creating a weekly menu was too time-consuming, and even too boring! But something happened as I sat down every week to figure it all out: I got excited at being able to create new things and get us out of the same-old-same-old menu rut. We’re having really great, healthy meals and I’ve had the time to test out new recipes. It’s a whole new spark in our kitchen!
Here are my top three tips on creating a weekly menu:
- Pick a time and day of the week that works without distraction. For me, it’s Friday night at 10:15pm after I put my kids, dog, and husband to bed.
- Sit with the pantry or food cabinet doors open. It helps me by just glancing in to see what types of things I already have and what I need to add to the grocery list as I’m selecting dishes.
- Make sure you select recipes everyone will like. I started just picking recipes that sounded good to me, and every meal became a struggle to get people (read: kids) to eat it. So, now I look at ingredients and make sure that I think about everyone’s likes/dislikes.
Ideally, I’d like to go to the farmer’s market and get fresh ingredients every day. Realistically, I go to the grocery store once a week so I buy what fresh to last through the week. I try to make sure to incorporate both fresh and packaged foods into the meal to keep it as healthy as possible.
If you’re following us on Twitter (@BetterBodyFoods), we’ll be giving you daily healthy menu ideas this week. We would love to hear your favorites and any suggestions you might have on planning healthy meals for you and your family.
