Plan Ahead

Imagine a morning where you oversleep, discover you’re out of cereal AND coffee, your kids can’t find their shoes, your clothes are rumpled and your iron quits working, and the car won’t start.

Complete and utter frustration.

I’ve got to be honest with you. If your family leads a busy schedule and you try to eat natural, unrefined foods, but you don’t plan ahead, you could feel like the person in the above scenario every single day, and you’ll probably give up.

I felt that way at first. A lot. I’m not the world’s best planner, and so there have been plenty of instances in the past where supper would roll around, and I’d pull a bag of nuggets out of the freezer and toss them in the oven or stop by Papa Murphy’s for a bake-at-home pizza. It was convenient, and I was a busy mom.

Then, we changed how we ate, but I still wasn’t a stellar planner. Dinner time would creep up, and I’d have nothing to serve. When you eat natural, there’s no pulling a frozen Stouffer’s lasagna out of the freezer or asking your husband to pick up McDonald’s on his way home. You’re on your own.

I quickly learned that if I was going to make this thing work without going insane, I was going to have to learn to plan. Menu planning was a must, of course, but that still left me spending hours in the kitchen making every meal from scratch. I was exhausted and burning out fast. What good is a healthier life if you spend all of it in the kitchen?

So, if we’re going to make this work, we’ve got to find shortcuts. I’ll try to share with you what has worked for our family, and I really do want to hear what works for you as well.

Today, take a look at your schedule. Begin thinking now about small pockets of time you can set aside to make a few items ahead each week so you’re not scrambling every night to get it all done. For me, it’s first thing Saturday morning. Even though it is somewhat inconvenient to get up on Saturday morning and mess up my kitchen, it is totally worth it on weeknights when the veges are already chopped, the meat is already cut, and the time-consuming homemade parts of my meals are already done.

When you set aside time to do it all at once, you seem to get more done in less time, too. You can cook more than one thing at a time, you only have to pull out all of your supplies once, and there’s just one giant mess to clean up, instead of a big, time consuming mess every night.

Please, don’t get discouraged and give up if you’ve been trying to eat natural but the meal preparation has been too much. Let’s continue to find shortcuts and quick, easy meals to fix that will make healthy living a reality for the busiest of us.