Episode 108: Why You Hate Meal Planning (And How to Finally Fix It)
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
If "what's for dinner?" sends you into a spiral at 5pm, this episode is for you.
Meal planning comes up almost every single week in my sessions with clients — and I don't think that's a coincidence. We are all stretched thin, running on decision fatigue, and desperately wishing someone else would just tell us what to eat. In this episode, I'm breaking down exactly how I approach meal planning (with my clients and in my own home), and I promise it's simpler than you're making it.
I'll walk you through where to start, how to build your family's go-to meal list, and how to create a system that actually holds up when life gets busy. Whether you've never meal planned before, you've tried and it always falls apart, or life has changed and your old system no longer fits, you'll learn something in this episode.
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
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You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode. Hello, welcome to another episode of the podcast. I hope you're doing well. I hope you are finding moments to enjoy and appreciate this Maycember. In this episode, I wanna talk about one of my favorite topics. I said this to a client just the other week that I could totally geek out on this topic, and I do often In sessions, in my personal life, and that topic is meal planning. I kid you not, this comes up probably weekly in sessions with new clients, with clients who have worked with me for a long time, And I think it's probably coming up a lot right now because we are feeling so stretched for time and wanting to find opportunities in life to streamline things and to work a little bit ahead. And I think meal planning is a topic that we continue to come back to because, you know, maybe you've tried things in the past, but it never really sticks, or when you go out of town for a trip or you have a really busy week, it falls apart and never really gets back into a routine. Maybe you have never planned in advance before, and this is something that you've always wanted to get a handle on or put in place. You think it could make life easier, less stressful in the moment. This is for you. Or maybe you are noticing that your season of life or your life stage has changed. I know that has had a big impact for me on meal planning, and so it is always a good idea to revisit. So wherever you are on that spectrum, never done it, have done it but it never sticks, or things have changed and what used to work no longer works, we're gonna cover it all here for you today, so buckle up. This is gonna be a good one. I'm gonna be bold and say that what all of us are looking for when we- desire or want to improve our meal planning process is that we are all looking for a decision to be made. I started a new romance book last night, and in the first two chapters, the main female character who's managing a lot in her personal life said something about how it would just be so nice to not have to cook every meal, to not have to decide what to make every meal, and I thought, "Yes, that is what we are all looking for." We would love it for someone else to decide and just let us know what we're having for dinner. Now, if you can outsource that or you have a partner that is all for taking that on, I love that for you. But if that is not your reality, the option that you have available is for your past self to make the decision for you, and that is what meal planning is all about. Because what so many of you hate, myself included, is having to decide what to eat when it's time to eat. You are most likely tired from a long day. You are hungry. Your kids are hungry. They are also tired from a long day, and you have already made 1,000 decisions. Meal planning is simply deciding in advance. It doesn't have to be hard, doesn't have to take a ton of time, I promise. Unless you love this , and you want it to take time and this is your passion or your happy place, then by all means have fun, stretch it out, but it doesn't have to be that way if this is something that you dread, that you view as a chore, that you would rather not be doing. Because the alternative to sitting down and making those decisions in advance is... Well, you already know probably what the alternative is. It's trying to decide when you are suffering from decision fatigue. It is having an idea of what you want to make or have for dinner, but not having what you need to bring that meal to life. It's knowing that you'd like to make pasta, but you didn't get it the last time you were at the store or had groceries delivered, so now you have to make another decision because you don't have what you need Or maybe it's not having really anything in the house that could constitute a meal, and so you order takeout again, or you eat cereal for dinner again. I am not opposed to ordering takeout, going out to eat, having a frozen meal. I think those options are great. I think they save so many of us on many nights. But I think those options are great if that's what you want, if that is what you chose when you mapped out your meals, when you made your meal plan. I have worked with so many women on creating their meal planning process, and they do choose to have multiple nights a week of takeout or eating out or having frozen meals or meal delivery or meal kits, right? There are so many options. And I, I think that is a great choice. They plan for that. They often place those nights strategically on the calendar to align with extracurriculars that are gonna run late into the evening or on exhausting work days or on the last day before the groceries are delivered and the pantry is kind of empty. It is on purpose. It's not something that you have to do because you don't have any other options. Now, whenever meal planning comes up in a session, often what I hear is that those working moms are wanting to eat out a little bit less. They, they wanna do it, but they wanna do it strategically and by choice, And they just wanna do it a little bit less. They wanna save money by using the food that's actually in their fridge or in their pantry. They want to cook. They want to have a home-cooked meal at least a couple of times a week. But mostly, they just want to know. They want to look at the calendar ahead and know that they have a plan. They wanna know that they have groceries and the ingredients that they need to eat the way that they want. They want to look at a week and see that their kids are at least having a few vegetables and maybe a little variety. They want to see that they can eat what they want. They wanna have a breakfast, , that feels good, or they want to prep a lunch for work. They're tired of defaulting to whatever is fastest or whatever is most convenient or whatever is right in front of them in the moment because they ran out of time and energy. I'm guessing that sounds familiar or resonates with you, too. So I wanna take you through some very simple steps, simple things that you can put in place to start to build this routine and this system for yourself of deciding in advance what you're going to eat so that you don't save that decision until it absolutely has to be made. Now, before we get into the steps, I do want to level set on definitions here. So in my mind, a meal plan is different from meal prep. A plan is the decision piece. It's deciding that we're gonna have pasta on Monday and tacos on Tuesday and stir-fry on Wednesday and so on and so on. Prep to me is very different, and that's not what we're talking about here today. Prep is when you are making meals in advance or preparing the food so that when it comes to be Tuesday at dinnertime, all you're doing is warming it up or assembling in some way. All right. So what we're talking about today is the planning piece. And where I always start when someone says to me, "I want this. I want to meal plan. I want to make these decisions in advance," my first question back is always, "What are your family's go-to meals? What are the things that your kitchen is known for?" I want you to start by listing out maybe 10 or 12 or 15 meals that you know you can make that most everyone will eat and that preferably, they're not long, drawn-out, complicated, intricate recipes that maybe you would have when you're hosting a dinner party or a holiday event. Right? We're talking mac and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, grilled cheese, stir-fry. , maybe your family loves these turkey burgers or you love this casserole or you know you can always make enchiladas on a Tuesday night and everybody'll be happy. I am guessing that you at least have a handful of those that you could just tell me right now without too much thought. And these can include those basic meals. Yes, some of them might be recipes that you follow, but others might be breakfast for dinner, might be pizza, might be Trader Joe's frozen orange chicken. It might be mac and cheese with peas or grilled chicken and a salad. It is the meal that might involve a recipe, or it might not. So that list that you rattled off or that you started to think about, I want you to write it down when you get back to your computer. If you're driving, you know, don't do it now, but get to a place where you can. Maybe you add it to the Notes app on your phone or in a Google Doc, someplace that you can reference when you sit down to decide what to eat this week. Because when you go to make those decisions about what to eat, just like when you decide what you're going to do today, you need a list of options. You need a list of options that you can choose from. We might even wanna call it a menu, right? A restaurant has a menu that tells you what they offer so that you can make a choice. Your family menu is the same. This is what our family kitchen offers, so that when you look at the calendar at the week ahead, you are not pulling from your memory. You are not looking at the reels that you saved on Instagram or TikTok or Pinterest or cookbooks or printouts or recipe cards. You're just going to a list, a central hub, a central menu that you can skim through and pull out what is going to fit, what you're in the mood for, what you have on hand that you need to use up. I would also encourage you, wherever you put this list of go-to meals, to include a section somewhere on there of recipes or meals that you want to try. This gives you a place where you can copy and paste those links that you come across in a Substack post or an email newsletter or, group chat or the mom's Facebook group. You can put all of those in that section, and we're gonna come back to what you do with those in just a minute. So once you have that family menu, meal planning is as simple as finding a few minutes to sit down, to stand up, to do it in the parking lot while you're waiting Where you look at your calendar for the next week, you notice what is coming up, what do we have in the evenings, how much energy are we going to have, and then you choose what you want to have for dinner. Maybe you decide that you do want two nights of takeout, and you're gonna put those, again, on the days where you've got extracurriculars or a meeting that runs late or a Girl Scout whatever or a work event. That's gonna make sense there. But what that does for you also is that you go into that dinner time knowing that you're gonna order takeout, and so you do need to do that in advance. You do need to understand what everybody's order is going to be. Maybe certain places are busy, or you want to allow for delivery time or drive time to get there. That helps you as well in the same way as knowing that you need certain ingredients for the meals you're going to cook. , having a meal plan, again, doesn't mean that you have to or you're going to cook every meal from scratch. So now for those of you who have a smaller list of go-to meals, maybe you only have six or eight, you need to have a goal of lengthening that list, of adding to it. So that's where that recipes to try section comes in. You could, and I would encourage you to, choose a night of the week, it doesn't have to be every week, but maybe every other week, where you don't have things scheduled, where you have a little bit more space to try something new. Because we all know when we're trying a new recipe, maybe it's just me, but I'm slow. I'm reading something new. I'm figuring it out. I'm learning. So for our family, that's Sundays. Those typically are slower days for us, so I can easily try a new recipe on a Sunday. I've had clients where it's the middle of the week is a better night for that because maybe a spouse is on call or working weekends, so you wanna choose a night where maybe you're both home, so one person can be fully focused in the kitchen on trying this new recipe while the other is on kid duty. You are trying new things with the aim of learning whether this is something you can add to your regular rotation or whether it missed the mark completely, and you can just ditch it and move on to the next new recipe that you want to try. So that is your goal. Anytime you're trying a new one is where does this go? I've tried new recipes where I'm like, "I could never make this on a regular week." This is a hosting, you know, special occasion holiday meal only, and I have a section for those types of recipes. So at its simplest, that is meal planning. Don't overcomplicate it. That is the thing that I see most of you do, is you just wanna make it so complicated with all of these hoops to jump through. No, it is just looking at your calendar, using your go-to list of meals, and deciding which of these do I want to put in to which day. Then, of course, you make your grocery list. You check your fridge and your pantry, and you put all the ingredients that you need on the list, and you need to find a day to go to the store, have your groceries delivered in advance. But it is looking at your calendar, looking at your list of go-to recipes or meals, and making the decision in advance, so you're not doing it on the night of. Now, an objection I hear a lot is about variety. "If I only have 10 go-to meals, we're gonna be eating the same thing over and over again." Well, for a lot of you, I would guess that you're already doing that. I know I am. With takeout, you're going to the same places over and over again. You have pizza every Friday, like we do in our house, or Taco Tuesday. It is okay to repeat meals. There's nothing wrong with that. We have it in our mind that we should have all these fancy dinners or we should have a lot of variety. You It's never as much repetition as you think, especially if you are eating out and maybe sprinkling in other novelty meals. And so you have to decide what variety means to you. If you have 10 meals on your menu and you're cooking five times a week, that means you're having the same meal every other week. Is that okay? And if that's not enough variety for you, then your focus should be on trying new recipes to increase that list of go-to meals. Don't just pin them or save them, but actually put a new recipe on your meal plan so you can make it and add it to your rotation. Another question I get a lot is about when and how frequently to plan. So clients will ask me, " how frequently should I be making a meal plan? Is it once a week? Is it every other week?" And you might need to experiment here to see what works best for you. I don't have the gold standard answer. Back in, like, early 2020, maybe 2021, 2022, I went through a season of planning for the entire month. So I would choose four weeks' worth of meals. Now, I made my shopping list and went to the store on a weekly basis, but I batched my decisions and made those once a month. So I was really only sitting down to meal plan 12 times a year. That worked better when my kids were young and we didn't have extracurricular activities. This season, I plan on a weekly basis because our schedules are so much more variable. There are lots of last-minute things that pop up and invites and school stuff that they didn't send out until a couple of days before or the week before. And so I've just found that I can be more responsive to that if I plan on a weekly basis. But I do this so much that I've gotten pretty fast at the process, and it doesn't take much time for me to sit down and choose our meals for the week ahead. In terms of when you do this, it doesn't really matter. You know your weekly cadence best or your monthly cadence or whatever you decide. What you really need to be thinking about or the first decision that you need to make is when do you want to go to the store or have your groceries delivered. And if you are doing some meal prep, when would that be? And then you reverse engineer from there. So if you wanna prep on Sunday or you just wanna have all of your food on Sunday, so your meal plan starts with Sunday night's dinner, then maybe you wanna shop on Saturday, so you need to have your meal plan made, your decisions made, and your list created before that. And if you're placing an order for pickup or delivery, you need to do it earlier than that to make sure that you get the delivery day that you want. So really it's about deciding when does my meal plan start for the week? When do I want the food in my house? And then think back, "Okay, I need to have my list ready, my order placed, therefore my decisions need to be made by this day." Now again, meal prep is a whole other topic. I know so many people love this, and others don't. It's totally a personal preference in what is actually going to help you. I rarely prep entire meals. I save that for a week where my husband is traveling or I know I need a couple of meals that I can just warm up, and then I choose based on that decision of needing to choose things that can be easily made ahead. I will oftentimes on a Sunday chop veggies or grill chicken in advance so that the actual cooking on a weeknight is easier and faster. I'll wash fruit and vegetables to have for lunches. I'll make maybe some breakfast muffins if I'm feeling ambitious and have the time. Those are all small gifts for my future self, but the biggest gift really is the decision. Make the decision in advance. Have a plan. You make enough decisions all day long. Do not save what's for dinner for 5:00 or 6:00 PM in the evening when you are tired, hungry, and probably don't have what you need to cook dinner anyway. So that is my challenge to you. Don't overthink it. Start very simply and make those decisions in advance, and get help if you need it. I help a client, no joke, weekly on meal planning. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you what to do. Not that I tell you exactly. You are the expert on your own life and your own schedule, but I ask the questions. I help you spot the gaps that are missing in your plan, and then help you outline it in a way that makes sense and is something that you can actually follow through on. I do this work all of the time with clients, and I do have two openings right now for one-on-one clients. We can start with your meal plan so that that's running smoothly in a matter of weeks, and then move on to the other systems and routines that could make daily life just feel so much easier, freeing you up to be more present with your kids, to take care of yourself, even just take a walk and to just be more relaxed about everything. If that sounds like what you are looking for, I invite you to fill out a short application at themothernurture.com/application. I cannot wait to hear from you. I hope this episode was helpful. I hope you're feeling inspired to go make those decisions for your future self. And until the next episode, I hope you take care, and I'll talk to you soon Thank you for listening and as always, for being a part of this working mom community. You can find everything related to this episode in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast, you can also find information about how I support working moms just like you through one-on-one, and group coaching, as well as access a number of resources and articles all on my website at themothernurture.com. I will see you again next week for another episode of the podcast.
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