I have something to confess. There’s a strategy I recommend to every single client I work with. It’s a strategy so essential to their success that we build direct support for it into all our client packages. A strategy that, when absent, can be the factor that makes achieving health goals feel insurmountable. And yet, this strategy is something I loathe to do myself. Can you guess what it is?
Meal planning.
Just writing the words makes me tired. I have strategies for making it easier – and, yes, they do make it easier – but at the end of a long week when all I want to do is unplug and hang with the kids, the last thing I want to be bothered with is to figure out what’s for dinner that night, let alone for the week ahead!
And yet, effective meal planning is truly the ticket to success when it comes to healthy eating. Knowing ahead what you’ll be making for dinner and having the ingredients stocked and ready to go, maybe even doing some of the prep ahead of time, can make dinnertime a breeze. Half the battle is figuring out what to eat. And standing at the fridge exhausted at the end of a hard day, the kids at your heels, staring at its contents for inspiration is a NOT recipe for success. Trust me. I’m married to a chef and even he would fail in that circumstance.
We’ll I’m super excited to share with you one of the tools that can make life So Much Easier in this regard: Real Plans. My all-time favorite meal planning tool.
The Real Plans app does more than plan your meals. It gets to know your family’s likes and dislikes. Remembers your favorite recipes. Tracks your macros. Streamlines shopping. And will even get groceries delivered to your doorstep.
I’m hooked.
Completely, utterly hooked.
If I had the brainpower, time, and technical support to make a meal planning service, here are the key features it would have:
- It would come with options – I could choose my meal type (paleo, traditional, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc), preferences, dislikes, and food sensitivities, and all the recipes it would give me would be based on these specifics.
- It would give me menu ideas, but give me total flexibility to move things around according to my week, to upload my own recipes, and to skip days completely if I feel like it. It would give me the flexibility to specify how many people are eating, as well as my budget.
- It would “read” my recipes and automatically generate a smart shopping list based on exactly what I’m cooking that week, the number of people eating, and any changes I made to recipes I’m using. And this shopping list would be editable – I could go through and mark off what I already have, I could add things that are weekly basics even if they aren’t ingredients in the actual recipes. In other words: it would be just like my paper list, but much of the hard work done for me.
- In my perfect world, this shopping list would travel with me on my phone, and I could mark things off as I do my shopping. No paper required.
- It would include a day-by-day timeline that helps me know what I need to do to make sure dinner gets to the table on time and quickly.
So imagine my utter delight when I learned that these features are EXACTLY what the Real Plans meal planning tool offers, plus a couple more features that are so fancy and helpful, I didn’t even dream they were possible:
One of my biggest pet peeves about meal planning is that you never know how many people you’re planning for – is it a recipe for 2 or 4 people? What if 6 are eating that night, but only 2 the next night? This can make a huge difference in the volume of groceries you need to buy, and how much food you end up making. Most meal planning services default to planning for 4 people, but what if you’re single?
This upgraded meal planning service has a built-in feature where you can adjust the number of servings per meal. Yes, per meal. So if on Tuesday night it’s just you, but on Friday night you’ve got all the kids plus their best friends over for dinner, this software will do all the math for you and adjust both your recipe AND the grocery list accordingly. Now that is seriously cool!
And this isn’t just for recipes in their system – once you’ve uploaded one of your family favorite recipes, it will do it automatically for your recipes, too. Pretty amazing, right?!
I am officially hooked and will be using this regularly as my meal planning go-to. I think you should, too. Plus, right now they’re offering a New Years special: use the code RPNY20 to get 20% off your first month, quarter or year (!). Find out more about it and sign-up here.
If prioritizing your health is anywhere on your New Year’s list, then this tool could be just the thing you’re looking for.
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