Avoid Meal Planning Stress With One Easy Strategy

Meal planning — scheduling your meals ahead of time and buying only the ingredients you need for those specific meals — has plenty of benefits. You can easily put together your grocery list, and you'll likely reduce food waste. Additionally, you don't have to spend any energy during the week figuring out what you want to eat. However, meal planning involves its own kind of stress — it can be difficult to decide what you're going to be in the mood for three days from now.

Luckily, there's an easy strategy to help you avoid feeling overly stressed when meal planning: Don't plan all five weekdays. Instead, plan for just three days of the week. You'll save mental energy by only coming up with three meals, plus those open days give you wiggle room to order takeout if a craving hits. Plus, it's likely that one of the meals you make will result in leftovers, so you can use those on a flex day.

One tip you want to keep in mind for meal planning is making recipes that will yield plenty of leftovers. This helps during busy weeks since you can use leftovers for lunch or dinner, or freeze them in portions. With this in mind, it's important to have some recipes on hand that can be made in big batches — you can even double the recipes, if needed, depending on the size of your family. Some examples of easy, big batch recipes include easy vegetable fried rice, classic lasagna, and chickpea and potato curry.

Another tip? Don't get too ambitious. While it can be tempting to want to try out three new recipes during one week, stick to those you're familiar with for the majority of the meals. Pick one night — perhaps a night that you know will be the least busy — to experiment with something new.