Meal planning guide for beginners
Food is a basic necessity of life. If the allowances for food are low, there is a greater need to plan meals carefully. Meal planning for physical & mental health is essential. However most of the time, we don’t plan our meals and sometimes have health issues due to our diet. But meal planning can help you have healthy meals and snacks no matter how busy things get.
Meal planning is all about what to eat when to eat, and how to eat.
Meal planning basically involves 4 stages:
Planning — The entire family can sit together and plan a meal if it is a family.
Purchasing — For purchasing it’s better to go to a wholesale shop and buy things, therefore you get a variety of things, as well as the cost, is reduced.
Preparation — While performing this task, perform this beforehand and try to combine various foods and prepare them.
Serving — During serving, at least try to make it a habit to eat food with the family members at least one meal a day.
Keep in mind that meal planning doesn’t involve thinking about months worth of upcoming meals. It’s broken down week by week to make the process easily digestible.
Points to take care of while meal planning:
-while planning a family meal, age and occupation should be taken into account.
-Take the help of a food guide in selecting foods.
-It will help you to decide the amount of food needed for each group.
-Use seasonal vegetables and fruits. Make sure it is fresh and inexpensive.
-Pick the foods which add up to meet the needs of various family members.
-Cooperation of family members will lead to greater acceptance and enjoyment of the meals.
-Meal planning is intimately connected with food purchases.
-Purchase of food depends on space and condition of storage.
What each meal must include:
The minimum requirements of a meal plan consist of cereals and loaves of bread, body-building foods, fruits and vegetables, vitamin C-rich fruits and veggies, and 25gm oils and sugars or more.
-Cereals and their products give energy and protein
-Sugar, oils, and fats provide energy, satiety, and palatability.
-Veggies and fruits provide Vitamin A&C, minerals, and fibers
-Dals, milk, egg, and fish/meat supply proteins, B-vitamins, and some minerals.
Meal planning is an investment in your health that can save you time and money. While starting a meal plan, keeping it simple, and building on your routine to create a habit will help you continue the practice for the long term. If you have any special dietary needs and are concerned about planning your meals, or don’t know how much to eat for your goals, speak to a registered dietician or nutrition expert. Meal planning can definitely avoid the question of asking “what will we eat today”. By preparing a meal plan, we can simply check on it and prepare it very easily without getting confused about what to cook on that day. If you start simple in your first week or two, you can branch out with more involved or creative recipes, or even begin to include more meals and snacks into your planning and prep.
Preparing a meal plan into a meal
-Prepare a food purchase list, according to family members
-Use cooking methods, which retain nutrients with palatability.
-Serve meals that are appetizing and attractive.
-Manage the time, energy, and available materials.
-Make a weekly plan for all meals, which saves time, energy, and money. And it helps you to avoid monotonous meals.
Everyone can benefit from meal planning: busy people, small and large families, single-family households, those who want better control over what they eat, those who want to save money, students, and the list goes on and on. That is to say, meal planning is important — not just on a personal level but also on a global scale. On a personal level, it allows you to have better control over your nutrition, helps with portion control, and comes with the advantage of helping you save both time and money. On a global scale, it helps in reducing food waste and leads to an overall greener footprint.
