One of the most important things to staying on track with your healthier lifestyle is being prepared! One way to do this is to plan your meals. I have come across some tools that have helped me that I thought I would pass on to you.

Making a plan for the week has become one of the best time saving and stress reducing action step that I have been doing more and more. I have weeks that I think “Oh I don’t have time to do that this week”. Those tend to be the weeks that things creep in that shouldn’t, or carry out comes home for dinner.

It makes life so much easier when you have a plan and stick to it. The time saving and stress reduction comes from not having to think  ”What am I going to eat”  every day, every meal. Just stick to the plan!

Sit down once a week check your schedules and plan your week. One thing that I have found to be a time saver is to make extra at dinner so you can use all or a portion of it to take for lunch. If you are making some kind of backed chicken make extra and use it to add to a wonderful salad the next day for lunch, or cut up some veggies and make a good chicken and veggie soup. This is also a good tip for those weeks that you might have late days at work or obligations that keep you from having lots of time to make a meal. Save the leftovers for days like that.

I have been using MasterCook Software for some time now. It is a great program that comes with lots of cookbooks pre-loaded for your use. You can do specific searches to include or exclude foods to find recipes that fit your dietary requirements. You can also make your own cookbooks buy imputing the recipes that you love or coping and pasting the recipes from any online source. Over time I have organized my cookbooks so they are easy for me to make my meal plans. I have created cookbooks like smoothies, salads, juices, quick dinner, soups etc. So when I am planning my week I can click to add a recipe and I can quickly go to my smoothie cookbook and pick the ones that sound good to me for the week and so on and so on for the remainder of the week.

It takes a little extra time at the beginning, like everything new you learn, but once you have a core group of recipes that you love and are good for you entered into your cookbooks then it is a snap!  Then you are just adding one here and there when you come across new recipes you want to add to your library.

You can also add your meal plan to your shopping list and modify it so you only get what you need. Remember if the junk doesn’t come into the house it doesn’t get into your mouth. The meal plan can then be printed out,  which will have your week plan along with the recipes, your shopping list and nutrition analysis. Here is a link that you can use to order MasterCook. It is a steal at $19.99.  It is also on my Recommended stuff page above.

I opened up an e-mail this weekend from Cozi Family Calendar, which is a free on-line calendar that I have been using for keeping track of personal appointments, bills, birthdays, etc.  It is a great calendar.  Your whole family can access it and you have everyone’s schedule at the tip of you fingers.  I am not going to go into all of the features, here is a link that you can go to that tells you all of that.  Cozi Features   What this e-mail informed me of was that they added a Meals tab and a Shopping tab to the calendar.  I got on and played around with it and found it very easy to use.  I was pleasantly surprised.  They have a great five minute video that shows you the basics on how to use it.  Here is a link to that: Cozi Meals video.

I really liked the ease of adding recipes and the click and drop feature which makes planning the week really easy.  I re-planed a week I had done in the past to see how much time it took me to get all the recipes added, put them into the calendar, add them to the shopping list, and edit the shopping list.  It took me 25 minutes. WOW!!

The only things I thought could be easier is that you have to click on each recipe and then click to add to shopping list instead of being able to add them all at once.  Then you are able to go into the list and delete the things that you don’t need. I do like the fact that you can click and drag the ingredients around to group things together and add the duplicates together so you get exactly the amount that you need.  The other thing is that when you print out the plan it doesn’t print out the recipes so you have to do them individually.  I would suggest keeping a file of all of your favorite and most used recipes so when you make your plan you can just pull out the hard copy to use for that week. You can also always review them online.

One really big advantage that the Cozi calender has is that they have apps for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry.  This allows you  to access your calendar and shopping list form anywhere.  You can also send a grocery list or to do list to any family member’s phone via text.

The Cozi calendar is Free which is wonderful.  You do have to put up with some advertising of course.  If you don’t want to deal with the advertising they offer a upgraded version ad free for $2.99 a month.

What every you decide to try, having a plan keeps you on track and saves lots of time and energy.

Happy Meal Planning!