Are You a Planner?

Meal planner, that is. I can honestly say I am not. I have a friend who is great at planning her family meals while able to cook low carbohydrate alternatives for herself. She posts her dinner meals on Facebook all the time and I am truly envious.  They look yummy, sound yummy, and if my browser had an olfactory plugin, I’m sure I’d say they smell yummy, too.  Not surprisingly, she’s definitely a meal planner.

Don’t get me wrong.  By nature I am a total planner/organizer. I function better when things are written down and displayed especially when several people are involved. For me, I’d be planning meals for one. Maybe that’s why it seems time consuming.  Normally, I can just toss ingredients together after raiding the refrigerator’s contents. My difficulty lately is actually having usable ingredients IN the refrigerator.

You might remember my sister visited a recently, and when she opened my fridge, she had no words.  I think there was cheese, eggs, lettuce, radishes, and a couple of alcoholic root beers.  Okay…there were a few other things, but not much that could be used to throw a meal together…especially not a fresh and healthy one. What happened to my healthy eating practices?

I know french fries contributed to my eating detour. I gave into a craving for them…for about a month, 2-3 times each week. It doesn’t help I walk past the local hamburger joint to get to my corner pharmacy. I know. That’s not an acceptable excuse. So I recently (this morning) decided to try meal planning again.

I did a search on Pinterest for easy to use forms.  I don’t recommend this. You’ll find calendar forms, lists divided into grocery store departments, fancy ones with graphics,  plain ones printable at home, colorful ones, and simple black and white ones. It was really overwhelming.

I quickly abandoned that and did a Google search.  I discovered several websites offering software, and some even offer services where real people help you with your planning needs. Some software is free, none of the service based programs were free.  Not shocking. I found Plan to Eat. A responsive app that works on any mobile device and also works with your desktop/laptop.  This seemed like a good fit as I’m always online looking for new healthy recipes on my laptop or my tablet. Then I can use my mobile at the grocery store. It has a “clipper” feature allowing you to drag recipes into your meal planner from wherever you find them on the internet. I was impressed by other features designed to give you option.  So, I’m going to do the free 30-day trial.  I registered and am going to throw myself into planning.

Join me, if you want to try the free trial,too.  Just click here or on the pretty picture below. You could be my first recipe swap friend. I’ll post a progress report in a week. Wish me luck!

Until next time…