Will Weekly Meal Plans Help With Weight Loss?

When it comes to weight loss, many people will recommend meal plans. It’s something I had to recommend as a Weight Watchers leader, even though it was something I didn’t and never did do. We still don’t set meal plans in the house.

We don’t quite plan our meals for weight loss

We tried it once, but we just didn’t stick to the plan. That doesn’t mean we don’t plan ahead, but we don’t have a strict set of meals for the week. We’ll work off how we’re feeling and what’s happened in the day.

Our way of planning is choosing in the morning what to eat for dinner. When my husband used to work, I’d pull out some meat and we’d work with that when he got home. There would be times that I’d decide as my day went on. If I finished work early, I could do the cooking. If I was still working when he walked in through the door, he’d be the one to choose.

Now it works very differently with both of us inside the house all the time. We’ll discuss what we can have for dinner.

We are planning more but to save money

Actually, we tend to plan a little more now. This isn’t because of weight loss but to save money. While we’re better off than we were in the UK, we’re still getting used to the way things work here. Some of our favorite foods have gone up in price.

One of those is bread! It’s double the price, but we’ve found that we can make our own for much less. And actually, it’s quite fun making our own bread. We know exactly what’s in it and the little ones get to join in. Our eldest loves helping.

To be able to do things like this, we need to make sure we have the right food in the house. So, rather than planning our meals out, we’ll plan our food list out. The only food we have in our house is healthy stuff. We’ll have some pasta, potatoes etc, but we also make sure we have plenty of high-protein and high-fibre houses.

So, while we don’t quite plan our meals, we’re not working from nothing. We plan our food buying to keep the cost down and this just happens to help our weight loss efforts. This works for us and everything that we need to do.

We wouldn't be able to plan this week anyway. We're off for the weekend and it's Monkey's first day at school on Tuesday, so well be thrown into a completely different routine very soon.

Do you set out a weekly meal plan? Do you find that meal planning helps your weight loss? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.