On Saturday I will post my first meal plan to Steemit. Before I do I wanted to share why I choose to meal plan and why I think you should too!
I recently started formally meal planning - actually using a notebook and pen, trying to get inspired on Google/YouTube/Pinterest - but when I think about it I've been meal planning for most of my life.
I've been in the kitchen with my mum since I was a little girl. She started teaching me to cook from around 10, and by the time I was a teenager I was 'sous chef'. Every weekend she'd ask my dad what he wanted to eat for next week, and true to form, he'd always reply with very specific requests. I'd occasionally throw in my own requests too but the older I got the less interested I became in food as something for myself. This changed after I started blogging about food and rediscovered everything I love about cooking.
I think meal planning has become both underrated and overrated. It's something fashionable people do in the new-year-new-me phase of their lives. It's something glamorised as part of society's current obsession with policing what we eat.
I don't meal plan for diet or fashion.
I want to point out now that I do not stick to any kind of diet (vegetarian, vegan, 5-2, keto, etc) nor do I meal plan to count calories because I'm trying to lose weight or anything like that. If you read my meal plans, feel free to ask about recipes that fall into a specific category, and I will happily try and include them! But that's not why I create them.
The main reason that I meal plan now is because of time.
People value everything except for their time.
It's Tuesday night and you've got nothing in the house. You've been at work all day, now you're on your way home and you're scrambling for ideas for what you're going to eat for dinner along with all the other household things you have to do when you get home. You start thinking about all the things that are going to take up your time, and realise that there's just no space in there for cooking. This is how you convince yourself - console yourself - to resort to takeaways, ready meals, or something quick and unsatisfying.
To me, meal planning is simply allocating one hour to an activity to save yourself 3+ hours in another. I'm very pragmatic about it. If you have time to sit and scroll through your phone (if you have time to read this post right now!) then you have time to cook. If you sit down when you have some free time, really take the time to find recipes that you think will taste good, write out what you need, buy what you need, understand the process and how long each meal will take you to make and how long it will last for, you will reach a higher plane.
We all need to eat, but it's become easier than ever to just not cook, and to find a faster, simpler solution to a seemingly time-consuming activity. If you don't factor in the time food takes up in your life, you will neglect it and fall into bad habits. I think it's really that simple.
People think that food is bad for them.
I noticed this the most when I was at university. This was my first experience of people avoiding particular foods or ingredients because of something that they had read off-hand, or because of some new trend that they had just learned about on social media.
This idea is becoming more and more popular, and it's poisoning the minds of more and more people. There is nothing wrong with food. There are problems with the way we farm, manufacture, process, and think about food. But food is not bad for you, not if you take the time and effort to understand how it fits into your life.
I also notice that people say that they care about their money, but I see people waste it every day on 'food' that provides no nourishment, no sense of achievement, and often sacrifices taste for convenience.
People see food as something time-consuming, wasteful, and they don't see the joy in creation and getting to taste something you've made yourself (or even better, seeing someone else enjoy what you've made). I believe if you spend an hour on a Sunday figuring out a few things that you can cook at strategic points in your week, you will save money, prevent waste, be fulfilled and, hopefully, bring yourself happiness.
Generally speaking I think before you choose to do anything in life, you should plan it out. Cooking is no different, at least not to me!
I would love to hear your thoughts on this if you have any. Do you meal plan? If so, what do you do for inspiration? Do you want to start meal planning or do you think it's a waste of time?