When we do an activity for a living, quite often we’re not great at doing that activity for ourselves. Think builders who never get round to doing the building work needed on their own house or gardeners who don’t have time to make their own garden look tip top and chefs who don’t cook at home!
Given this, when chatting to people about my work, a common question I’m asked is if I meal plan.
And yes I do, I practice what I preach. I’m lost without a meal plan.
I started meal planning when I was at Uni, soon realising if I was going to survive on a budget, it was what I needed to do.
It was around 2010, however, that meal planning became a passion for me. There was more to it than just being mindful of budget; it was a way to ensure I could work my way through the thousands of recipes in my cookery books, try and test out my own creations, recall the delicious meals I ate out, get ideas by looking back at them when I was stuck for inspiration as well as play around with ways to make it quicker, easier and more flexible to me as my circumstances changed.
Back when I started meal planning I used good old pen and paper, and I’ve still got my meal plans dating back to 2010. I can’t bring myself to throw them away!
Nowadays, I do my meal plans using a notes app which I can access on my phone and my laptop, and I have built up to working on a whole month of planning at a time. Sometimes I need to tweak the plan a bit as commitments change but that’s easily done and it feels so good to have it out of the way and not have to worry about it for several weeks.
Do you have a meal planning obsession?