As much as resolutions get a bad rap, I actually like them.
I love the start of a New Year and find that it's a great opportunity to reflect on the things that really worked over the previous year, as well as the things that didn’t.
A new calendar year feels like a fresh start and a great opportunity for new beginnings.
For some of us, we may be going back to a goal that we had set before but for whatever reason just didn't make it happen. Or maybe we did make it happen, but things started getting a little wonky as the year came to an end.
That was certainly the case for my own resolution…
Consistent Meal Planning
I know what you’re thinking.
Isabel, aren’t you a master meal planner? Isn’t that what you teach us to do?
Haha, yes. I actually am pretty good at meal planning but “life” happens here at the Price house just as it may happen at yours, and meal planning somehow fell to the bottom of my busy to-do list and eventually started to get ignored.
Now, there are some habits that have become such a way of life for us that no one here was ordering take-out or eating unhealthy food items. The biggest positive habit being that we always have leftovers of something in the fridge and the freezer that can be quickly reheated in a moment’s notice. But what I was finding was that every night was becoming a last-minute “so what are we making here?” which induces its own special kind of dinnertime stress.
I found the other factor is that my kids are older now (12 and 14) and very good in the kitchen, so on many nights they were happy to just make some pancakes or a panini and let my husband and I forage the fridge. That’s all fine and well and actually a great back-up plan, but I was finding this was happening way more frequently than I was happy with.
So here are the 2 very simple things I did to get our meal planning off to a great start in 2024. “Simple” being the important word here because I find that when I overcomplicate any area of my life, the habit or strategy never sticks.
First, I made a list of 15 of the most common and frequent meals we love to make. On this list were meals like taco night, burgers and fries, whole chicken in the air fryer, turkey burgers on the grill, chicken parmesan. As we started rattling off our favorite meals, we were at 15 in no time and we probably could have kept going.
Of course, this goes without saying, but every single one of these meals is my healthy version. Where a typical chicken parmesan is loaded with wheat and conventional dairy, mine is made with gluten-free breadcrumbs and organic parmesan cheese.
This really can be the case with almost every single meal.
I can look at any recipe or any meal and ask myself, “How can I make this into a healthy version?”
That’s exactly what you’ll find inside the LiveSmart meal plans. I’ve taken meals like pizza, mac and cheese, chicken cordon bleu, and even nachos and have created healthy versions.
In many cases, members have told us that their families enjoyed these healthier versions much better than the original version.
And yes, having your whole family enjoying a healthy meal together certainly makes sticking to your goals that much easier.
LiveSmart meal plans and recipes -> Click HERE to see what’s included.
Onto the second thing we did to stick to our meal planning goal.
We committed to going through our LiveSmart volumes (there are now over 50 volumes!) and choosing one new meal to make every 2 weeks.
Of course, we have already tried pretty much every single one. But many of them, like the ones in earlier volumes, we haven’t made in years, for no other reason than we just forgot about them.
So once every 2 weeks, we are going to look through them together and choose which one we want to make again and then see if it will make it into our rotation of meals.
I chose every 2 weeks instead of every week because that is a more realistic timeframe for us and I wanted to set us up for success.
Creating the LiveSmart monthly program has not just given me a way to help our members succeed in achieving their weight loss goals long-term, it has also been a blessing to my own family, in that it has helped us to keep our healthy eating fun, interesting, and (most importantly) delicious.
Could it be exactly what you need to make healthy eating super easy for you this year?