How Meal Planning Can Help You Lose Weight

Struggling to shed those extra pounds? The solution might be simpler than you think. Meal planning could be your ticket to a healthier, leaner you!

I’m sure you’ve heard of meal prepping, and if you’re like me, you’ve spent hours searching Pinterest and saving a ton of meal prep recipe ideas that you haven’t ever cooked 🤪. It took me way too long to realize this, but I’ve finally learned that meal prepping isn’t the secret to helping me stay on track with my nutrition. It turned out that what I really needed was a PLAN! Yep, like most things in life, having a plan makes it much more manageable. Now, I focus on meal planning as my crucial strategy to support a balanced approach to my nutrition and consider meal prepping a bonus if I have the time. So, let’s dive into meal planning and how it can simplify your life when trying to lose weight! 

What do I define as meal planning? 

Meal planning is the process of pre-determining and organizing meals for a specific period, typically a week, to achieve nutritional balance, save time and money, and meet personal health goals. It involves deciding what meals to eat in advance, often considering dietary preferences, nutritional needs, and available ingredients. Meal planning is a proactive approach to promoting healthier eating habits and overall wellness. Basically, it’s planning out your meals in advance 🙂 

And why should you meal plan?

Let’s start out with the big hitters: time, money, and stress! Deciding in advance what you plan to eat means fewer trips to the grocery store throughout the week, saving you time. And I’m pretty sure we can all benefit by saving some time! Planning means you’ll probably eat out less often, saving money and supporting your weight loss efforts. You may also waste less food, saving even more money. However, the #1 reason I continue to plan my meals is to reduce the number of decisions I make each week. Anyone else tired of being asked, “What’s for dinner tonight?”! We make thousands of decisions daily, and planning our meals for the week eliminates several decisions, saves you time, and reduces stress!

There are clear benefits to meal planning from a weight loss perspective. When you’re trying to lose weight you need to be in a calorie deficit. And it’s hard to just wing it and not have a plan for your meals and stick to your calorie deficit. Meal planning can also help promote mindful eating, prevent skipping meals, manage portion control, reduce impulsive eating like running to the drive-through, and, most importantly, help you ensure you consume balanced meals even when life is hectic! Overall, meal planning provides structure, organization, and accountability to your eating habits, making it an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining weight loss success. 

How do you meal plan?

First, you need to be consistent. A consistent cadence of when you will meal plan each week will support staying on track. So, pick one day each week to plan your meals. Then, make yourself a recurring calendar invite, setting aside time each week to do your meal planning. I don’t know about you, but if it’s not on my calendar, it’s not happening! 

Like most things, I like to keep it simple. I use a simple Google sheet to map out what we will do for dinner each night. I look at our schedule for the week ahead, what activities we have each night, and where they are located so I can pick meals that will work based on what’s going on. Do we have baseball from 5-7 pm? Then I need something easy we can take with us, eat early or later, or both if you’re my boys! 

And what if you want to meal prep? How should you go about that?

Meal prepping can absolutely help with weight loss. Having meals ready to eat or heat can be a game-changer! Once again, keep meal prep simple to help you stay on track with your weight loss efforts. Keeping it simple enables you to repeat it over and over, which is the key to being consistent for most things! 

Here are a few ways I approach simple meal-prepping ⬇️

Ingredient Prep:

Rather than prep every breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next seven days, consider ingredient prepping. Ingredient prepping could be chopping up some fresh veggies to grab for snacks or meals or preparing one protein you can use in a few different ways in dishes throughout the week. When I meal prep, I finish it in less than 2 hours. That’s about all the time I’m willing to give up on a weekend and set aside for prepping. 

Double It Up:

I also double up recipes, saving half in the freezer to use in the future. This is a total “Your future self will thank you” move!

Invest in Containers:

This may seem silly, but it can be a pain and a mess if you don’t have a proper way to store extra food. So do yourself a favor and invest in simple containers that stack and fit nicely in your fridge and freezer.

I’ve experienced the benefits of meal planning and know how it’s helped me keep off the 75lb I dropped for over eight years. Now, I help my clients learn to do the same, saving themselves time and money and reducing stress while supporting their weight loss efforts. 

If you’re looking for more help approaching meal planning and meal prep and want access to the tools I use to plan my family’s meals, check out my latest mini-class, Quick & Easy Meal Planning & Prep.

I’d love for you to keep me updated on your meal-planning efforts. Drop me a note at [email protected] and tell me how you’re approaching meal planning while working to shed some pounds!

Share:

More Posts

join our email list

hi, i'm lauren!

I help successful, high-achieving women like you implement efficient, proven and sustainable ways to prioritize your health and find your confidence again.

Hi, I'm Lauren!

I help successful, high-achieving women like you implement efficient, proven and sustainable ways to prioritize your health and find your confidence again.