Image credit

Cooking and eating food is a big part of everyone’s day-to-day life, regardless of where you live in the world, or your lifestyle. Whether you are a parent, a young adult, or living alone, planning the meals that you will eat each week will be a part of your life. To try and make things easier for you, here are several things to consider when you are next planning your meals for the week.

Can you incorporate meal-prepping?

When people think of meal prepping, often the picture that comes into their minds is a boring pot of rice, chicken, and broccoli. This is largely due to the gym culture of gaining muscle, while simultaneously losing fat. However, these bland meals do not need to be the case at all. Even if you have no intention of going to a gym, losing fat, or gaining muscle, looking into meal prepping is a great way to help plan, cook, and store all of your meals for the week. Not only will meal prepping help you plan what you are going to eat throughout the week, but it will also help free up your time by simply having to reheat your meals, instead of cooking them each day.

How much time do you have to cook?

When you are planning your meals for the week, something to consider is how much free time you have to cook all of your meals, especially if you are not meal-prepping. For example, if you have a busy week ahead you might want to think about planning some simple, yet tasty meals such as an italian sausage pasta, or some kind of soup. These meals often require very little ingredients, preparation, or cooking time, so they are ideal for those busy days or weeks that inevitably happen. However, if you find yourself with a little extra time during the week, you could look at incorporating some slightly more time-consuming, and extravagant meals into your plan.

What is your available budget?

Unfortunately, just like most things in life, food costs money. Because of this, when you are planning your meals for the week you will need to consider your available budget, and how much you can spend on groceries and ingredients. For example, unless you have the income to support it, it would be unwise to choose highly expensive meals to eat every evening such as steak or salmon. Instead, it would be better to balance these higher-quality meals with simple, hearty, and equally tasty meals with cheaper ingredients.

Do you think about your food waste?

A big problem all over the world is how much food people waste on a daily basis. Something to consider when you are creating your next list of meals and snacks is how much of it you might waste. By the end of the week, it is not uncommon to find spoilt food that has not been eaten for a variety of reasons. Something you could consider doing is using a food diary, or journal to keep track of what food you most commonly end up wasting each week so that you might make a slight change to your buying or eating habits, so as to reduce the amount of food waste you produce.

There are of course other considerations to take into account when it comes to planning what you will eat and cook for the week, but why not start with these?

Note: This is a collaborative post.