There are several aspects to maintaining the health and wellness of your family, many of them you can find in the first two blog posts of this series on family health (here and here). The thing that is going to help you implement all of these recommendations, however, is planning – meal planning to be exact!
Life gets busy, but you don’t have to sacrifice healthy eating because you and your family have busy schedules. You can get a healthy meal on the table after a long day of work or school with a little preparation.
Meal planning and prep will save you time and money!
Often we settle for take-out because we don’t have the time or energy after a long day of work and school to prepare a healthy meal for our family to eat, but if you set aside one day each week to plan and prepare your meals for the week, healthy eating during the week becomes a lot less challenging.
Here’s how it works:
- Set aside one day each weekend for meal planning. Use this time to decide what your family will eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the week.
- Make a grocery list complete with all the ingredients you need for each meal.
- Head to the grocery store to stock up on all the food you’ll need for the week.
- Spend some time in the kitchen preparing for the week:
- washing, chopping and roasting veggies
- pre-cooking chicken, turkey, beans or other proteins
- cooking carbohydrates, like oats, rice, quinoa, and cauliflower
- Store everything in BPA-free storage containers and refrigerate
It may take you an hour or two to plan meals and prepare, but it takes the guesswork out of weekday meals, making healthy eating much easier and sustainable.
It’s also an activity that everyone in your family can do together.
Prep once, eat all week long!
The trick here is to keep it simple.
When putting your meals together, think protein, veggies, starches, and healthy fats.
Your plate should be composed of 25% protein, 50% veggies, 20% gluten-free grains or starches, and 1-2 Tablespoons of healthy fat, like avocado or olive oil.
To make your meal planning experience a little easier, here are some of my favorite recipes:
Breakfast:
Turkey Sausage Patty with Eggs
Lunch:
Turkey Club Chopped Salad with Aioli Vinaigrette
Curry Roasted Vegetable and Lentil Kale Salad
Dinner:
Vegan Red Lentil Chili
Instant Pot Chicken and Vegetable Soup
Perfect Roasted Chicken
Fish en Papillote with Citrus, Ginger, and Shiitake
I hope these recipes inspire you to start meal planning with your family. I promise it will make healthy eating less stressful for you and your family.
In the next (and last) post in this series on family wellness, I’ll be discussing toxins and how to ensure the health of your family by removing toxins from your home.
With toxins lurking in everything from skincare to cleaning products, this is an essential part of your family wellness plan, and a blog post you don’t want to miss!
xo,
