How to Make a Weekly Meal Plan Without Losing Your Mind (Ep. 5)

If you’re busy juggling work, family and everything in between, you know how overwhelming meal planning can be. Finding meals that are healthy, tasty, and satisfying for everyone can feel like an endless chore.

It’s tough to juggle healthy eating with the preferences and schedules of everyone in the family.

In this conversation, I’m going to share how you can simplify meal planning to save time and reduce stress. By the end, you’ll have practical tips to make your meal planning stress-free and enjoyable.

This is a huge opportunity to simplify your life. You can avoid the chaos of last-minute meal decisions that sabotage your peace of mind and your health goals for your family.

Resources:
- Learn more about The Weekly Preview in Episode 3

- Cook Once, Eat All Week: 26 Weeks of Gluten-Free Affordable Meal Prep to Preserve Your Time & Sanity [affiliate link]

- Pinterest board of weeknight meal ideas

00:00 Introduction

01:47 Step 1: Choose a Time and Space

04:09 Weekly Preview and Meal Planning

04:34 Helpful Resources and Shortlists

05:07 Using a Cookbook

06:49 Creating a Pinterest Board

08:36 Consistency in Grocery Shopping

09:51 Posting Your Meal Plan

11:08 Final Thoughts

11:47 AI for Meal Planning

12:14 Bonus Resource: Control Calendar Chaos

12:36 Leveraging AI for Meal Planning and Grocery Lists

Follow me on Instagram for more time management tips
Or send me a DM:
https://www.instagram.com/jenna.piche

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennapiche/

5 Ways to Calm the Calendar Chaos:
https://theothersideofbusy.com/chaos

Transcript

0:01

You're busy, juggling work family and everything in between, you know, how exhausting meal planning can be finding meals that are healthy, tasty and satisfying for everyone in the family can feel like this endless chore. In this conversation today, I'm going to share with you how you can simplify meal planning to save time. He and reduced stress. By the end, you'll have practical tips to make meal planning. Stress-free and dare I say enjoyable. This is a huge opportunity to simplify your life. You can avoid the chaos of those last minute decisions that sabotage your peace of mind and the health goals for your family.. As women, it's easy to feel over-scheduled over tired and some days just over it. It's time to ditch the guilt. Still get things done and have time left for ourselves and the most important people in our lives. How do we do that? You're about to find out. Hey there. My name is Jenna. And here I share the latest biohacks mindset shifts and calendar control strategies to help you get to the other side of busy. I'll bring you insights on how to get more done in less time. So you can shut off that work and prioritize what truly matters. In today's conversation. I'm going to share with you how to create a weekly meal plan without losing your mind. I'll share resources, scheduling, and even ways to get the family involved to help you save some sanity. But make sure you stick around to the end. Right? I'm going to share with you a way you can leverage AI to create your weekly meal plan. With the grocery list in less than three minutes game. Changing. All right, so let's dive in. How can you create this weekly meal plan? That helps you meet your health goals. Without losing your mind. All right. Step one is just too. Choose a time and space to make that plan. Are you going to do it? On Monday mornings, are you going to do it? On Saturday afternoons. When do you have time to really sit down and think about it? I like to do this as part of my weekly preview. If you haven't heard me talk about the weekly preview, you can go listen to episode three, where I talk about. How not to miss important moments. It's a 20 minute practice that really helps you review the last week, gain any learnings to apply to the new week, but then take a 20,000 foot view at what's coming first. So you don't miss anything. And secondly, so you can plan ahead. This is my favorite time to meal plan. When I am already looking at what's coming up the next week, what work commitments do I have? Where are the kids going to be? What time do we need to be? Where. And so I can get a better idea of just what's realistic. I think one of the biggest challenges we have is we have these grandiose plans of cooking healthy every single night. And then we don't get home until 20 minutes before we want to put the kids to better be in bed ourselves. And then we just feel so defeated that we can't do this. So by creating this meal plan with your weekly preview, you can see what's coming and you can plan for those things. So I like to ask questions like what nights of the week are we. She going to be home for a family meal together. You know, my kids are young and so we don't have as much going on. If you have older kids, you probably know that it's hard to get the family together for a meal, or if you just have one or two people at home, maybe you have other commitments that prevent you from sitting down together every night. So first identify what are the nights that we truly need to be cooking. I also like to ask. Are there things where I know we, aren't going to be home in time to make a really good meal where maybe we need a grab and go. Maybe this is going to be a leftover night. Based on commitments that are going on. So if I have a networking event for work or the kids have soccer practice until six 30, we want to make sure we have quick options so that we aren't derailing everyone's bedtime, the kids and mine included, which isn't going to set us up for a good day, the next day. I also like to think about. What is the ideal time we would eat on some of these nights, you know, ideally it's the same time every night, but sometimes that shifts, especially if you are a family of one or two, and you're juggling a lot of, a lot of social commitments. Uh, picking a time that you might eat every night is really going to help you identify what can we actually make in the time that we have. So for me, this looks like spending time doing my weekly meal plan as part of my weekly preview on Sunday mornings. This used to happen for me on Mondays, but I just didn't feel like I could get enough in front of the week. So I've started sitting down with my cup of tea and my planner to look at what's coming up in the week on a Sunday morning. It's so nice to sit on the front porch. I can reflect and I can think about what's coming to help myself feel more prepared. After meal planning for a while, I realized the most exhausting part of it was really just coming up with ideas. Every single time I get so exhausted and trying to pull something out of the air that everyone's going to, like, that's going to be healthy. That's going to be easy. So I realized a few years ago that just keeping a short list of quick, easy, healthy meals now that my kids like is really a sanity saver. When it comes to meal planning for me. Then I don't get bogged down by the sheer volume of decision that I have to make. I know my shortlist. One of the ways I cut down on the sheer volume is by using a cookbook I love. A link to it in the show notes. It's called. Cook once eat all week. It's from Cassy joy Garcia. Now this is a gluten-free cookbook. Uh, 26 weeks of gluten-free affordable meal prep to preserve your time and sanity. And it truly does. I eat gluten and dairy free because that's what I feel like helps me show up as my best. And if that's not you, maybe there are other resources, but what I love about this cookbook and the way that it approaches meal planning is it provides an idea for a protein, a veggie, and maybe one other thing. And then you prepare meals three meals each week around that. So for example, maybe it chooses, pulled pork sweet potatoes and kale. So you only are buying those ingredients and it gives you three different ways to prep that. So you don't feel like you're eating the same thing every day. What I have found that is so helpful is it simplifies my shopping list. And then it even provides some ideas if I say have an hour or two on a Sunday that maybe I can cook the meat in advance or do any other advanced meal prep, it'll give me some ideas of how I can do that. So I can save myself time during the week. Now caveat here. Not everyone has time to meal prep. On a weekend when I totally get that. What I will say is that the weeks that I actually do a little bit of meal prep in advance and follow this cookbook. And I feel like I won the lottery on a random Wednesday. When I'm running in late. Or something happened that I wasn't expecting. I'm tired from the day. And I know I have dinner ready in the fridge. All I have to do is pop it in the oven. So if you choose this option, you'd need to schedule in an hour or two on the weekend. But again, you don't have to do that. If you're stressed and you can't fit this in. Another option to have a short list of recipes is to create a Pinterest board. I have one that I'll share in the show notes here. I have curated a list of 20, maybe 30 meals here that are quick and easy that I know my kids like that I know take 20 minutes or less. So when I'm meal planning, I open this Pinterest board and I just searched through what haven't we had in a while. What sounds good? What are the kids going to enjoy? Enjoy based on the schedule. And what I know, I have time to prep. Again, this helps because I'm not analyzing hundreds of recipe options. I know my 20 to 30 that we like, and it really cuts down on that time of choosing what we're going to make. I think it's also really helpful to curate your own. So you can start with mine, pin some of it, but make sure you're adding to this list and you have some variety. So you don't feel like you're getting stuck eating the same old things. Ultimately, what we're trying to do here is help you create a system. So that meal planning can be fast and easy. Can you make a decision one time that will make all other future decisions easier? And that's what this meal planning system will do for you. I used to work with a flight nurse who would work two days on two days off, two days on, and then five days off. And so meal planning was really sporadic for her because of her weird schedule. So what she decided to do was create four weeks of meals, five meals each week, and then she would just rotate. So she knew, Hey, this is a week a week. B a week C a week D and she didn't have to think about it now. Creating that system took her a little time upfront, but it saves her so much time on the backend and it helps her husband. Help her get those things ready for their young kids, because he knows what the plan is because there's communication and a system in place. So once you have your weekly meal plan, And a grocery list it's important then to choose a consistent time to grocery shop every week. Why? Because you're not thinking about it. You're not trying to fit it in, in between work. And going to pick up the kids and rushing to do this. Right. I ideally recommend it before you start the week. So if you can do it on a Saturday or Sunday, it's ideal to get that stuff in the house. If you want to advance meal prep, you have time to do it, but otherwise you're just not trying to fit it in the little confetti pieces of your week. So consistency can be really helpful here. I used to love doing my grocery shopping on Monday afternoons because I felt like nobody was in the grocery store, but now I've adjusted. And since I do my meal planning early on Sunday mornings, we grocery shop on Sunday afternoons. After we go to church. We live in the country and we go to church in town. So it's a great opportunity after I've created my meal plan and my grocery list, we go to church, we go to the grocery store, I get help from the kids doing all the groceries. And then I feel like on a Sunday, I am ready for the week and this isn't going to derail me. So I just invite you to think about when are you going to have the time and space consistently for the most part to do this kind of shopping. So you're not trying to rush it through the week. Then step three is to post your meal plan on the fridge or in some other command center area where others in your family can see it, or you can remind yourself. Y, well, if it's just you or maybe one other person in your household, it's really helpful that you're not trying to carry this meal list in your head. You can just see it, you know, what's coming, you know, you have a plan and you can just reference the plan. It saves so much mental capacity when you have it written out in an easy place. If you have other folks in the house. It can help because this communication can help leap frog some of those nights when you're having trouble catching up. So for example, my six year old might have soccer from five to six, 15 on a certain night. If I have something in the fridge that I've already prepped and had ready to go, I can just have a note that says for my husband, can you pop this in the oven for 30 minutes at three 50. Right. So when we get home, The kids and I. Dinner is almost ready instead of having to start it. When we get home. Now, again, this does require the forethought and the proactive planning, but it really does make me feel like supermom. When I have this plan going into the week. So we can stay on target with our consistency and our goals for our kids and for ourselves. So just some final thoughts. I'm not perfect in operating this system. But the weeks that I do operate it. I feel so much less stressed. I know the clients that I have shared this with feel the same. I'm actually feeding my family healthy foods, as opposed to whatever I can grab quickly. And it makes me feel a little bit more like supermom. Like I can do it all. Or at least the right things and that confidence runs into other areas of life. So give this system a try, let me know what you think or send me some of the tips that you have used to help simplify what can be a daunting task. Drop me a DM. That Jenna dot pisher. P I C H E on Instagram. In a moment I'm going to share with you how you can leverage AI to create your weekly meal plan with a grocery list in three minutes or less. But first. If you're already feeling like superwoman crushing your professional goals and showing up as your best self for your family and your personal life. Awesome. But most women, I know. I need a little bit more help keeping all those plates spinning and maintaining their sanity. So I've put together something really valuable for you. It's called five ways to control the calendar chaos. In it, I share with you three filters to help you prioritize your to-do list. So you can skip that paralysis analysis and just get the important work done. This helps you feel more accomplished. You can sign up for this resource@theothersideofbusy.com slash chaos, or click the link in the show notes. All right. Want to know how to leverage AI to create a healthy weekly meal plan with a grocery list in three minutes or less. Here we go. Step one. Open your favorite AI tool. Step to enter a prompt similar to this. Please act as a nutritionist helping plan healthy meals for a family of blank. These meals should have an option for the blank insert any kind of dietary modifications, pickiness, things like that, that you might need here. Ideally there's protein and vegetables with every meal. And then you tell them what you want. Please create five quick and easy. Dinner ideas with links to recipes for this family. Boom. That took me 30 seconds to type in. And then it spits out ideas. Like you can make chicken stir, fry baked salmon. Here's a link to the recipe. Here's a modification. If you're gluten and dairy free, I might even say, oh, I know my kids. Aren't going to like those Turkey meatballs. Can you swap Turkey meatballs for something else? Great. They'll pop in another recipe with another link. And then you can say these look great. Now create me a shopping list for these meals organized by grocery store department for an easy shopping trip. That took 15 seconds. What spits out is a list organized by produce meat and seafood grains and pasta spices, and seasonings making my grocery store list all of the more quick and easy and easy because it spit that out. Give this a try. Let me know what you think. And if you have found any other tips, tricks, and hacks to make meal planning, a little less of a pain and a little bit more of an enjoyable experience for you and your family, I'd love to hear them. If you got something out of today's episode. I hope you share it. Until next time may the work that you do create the meaning and the life that you deserve. I'm rooting for you.