A good plan is half the battle

No matter how good our intentions are in terms of our nutrition if we don’t plan out our week ahead then things probably wont go very well. We’ll find ourselves out and about or sitting staring at the vending machine at 3:30 in the afternoon and not knowing whether our next meal will be the Snickers bar or that tempting looking bar of milk chocolate.

What went wrong? We didn’t have a plan.

If it’s our first time on the path to better nutrition (or even if we’re seasoned vets at this) we decided we were going to have eggs and spinach for breakfast, a nice chicken curry for lunches for a few days and a tasty stir fry for dinners. We headed off to the supermarket grabbed our trolley, found the eggs, spinach and chicken then got waylaid on or quest to find “curry” and realised we had no idea what ingredients we actually need for it never mind how to make that stir fry we imagined.

The simplest solution? A good old fashioned shopping list.

If we know what food we want to prepare for the week ahead to get us closer to our nutrition goals then taking an extra 5-10 minutes to write down the ingredients we need to prepare it will bring us a huge step closer to those goals. Simply go through the recipes for the meals we intend to prepare and write out what we need to make them a reality.

A god old pen and paper will do the job just fine but given that most people will always have their phone with them pretty much at all times why not grab an app to record your shopping list? Go to the App Store or The Google Play Store if you are an Android user and search for “shopping list”. I guarantee you will find a ton of results, lots of them free. The nice (and useful) thing with this sort of app is it will start to remember your shopping list, if you find recipes that you prefer and start to make frequently then it will be easy to re add them.

Every little thing that makes the execution of your plans easier makes them far more likely to happen and gets you that step closer to your goals.