Too busy for Meal Plannign? Think again! 20 minutes on a Sunday afternoon.

This week I sat down for the first time in years and planned out a weeks menu of dinner or main course items.   Up to this point I don't plan too far ahead, and have been following the portion based approach to nutrition.  However  seeing my friend Ryan Chapman's blog photos of his weekly meal planning I was intrigued and actually a little bit jealous.

I've always told myself I don't have time to plan menus, shop & cook.   That was about 6 months ago I first saw Ryan's post about his weekly planning. This week Ryan challenged me to just sit down and try it...and see if it didn't save me time overall.  He said 15-20 minutes tops for the planning portion which is the most important part of the week.

He actually made it sound fun, so this is what I did.

1) I'd just bought a pretty new journal without knowing exactly how I'd use it.  It has a nice durable orange cover with an elastic band to keep it closed and fits nicely in my had when holding it open.  So I made it my nutrition journal!

2) I sat down with 3 cookbooks I've had for awhile, the p90x Nutrition Guide, The Eat Clean Diet by Tosca Reno, and The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet.   If you do this, it can be any 2 or 3 cookbooks...just grab some and sit down with yoru journal!

3) Across 2 open pages of the journal I wrote the following columns. On the left hand side I wrote these headings:  Day, Page and Book.  On the right side of the double page I wrote these headings: Recipe and Nutrition. 

4) Down the left hand side I wrote the days of the week.  I only planned to plan for 3 or 4 nights so that I wouldn't end up with a long shopping list. I need to keep my shopping trips short & simple or else I get overwhelmed easily

5) I browsed through the books and picked out 5 different recipes that all sounded yummy & yet simple plus a few things I"ve wanted to try like cooking with parchment paper.  As I found a recipe, I wrote down the page number and the book, the name of the recipe and simple nutrition information in the form of Calories  grams or fats/protein/carbs.  (So a recipe might look like this:  221 cal  2g/11g/30g) 

6)  As I wrote down the name of each recipe I jotted down a shopping list on another page in the same book. 

The whole process took only about 15-20 minutes to do.  

So today I went to the store with the list and I couldn't believe it...shopping only took me about 20 minutes!   I was so impressed with how quickly I got in and out.  My list had exactly 20 items on it and I checked each one off as I found it, and only had to sub for one item...adn it was a sub for the better...fresh green chilis rather than canned.   






Stay tuned for details of my first yummy recipes from this adventure.  Parchment baked Tilapia, Green Chile-Cilantro Rice and Baby Mixed Greens salad with blueberries.