Creating Healthy Meals is Easier
with Better Ideas, Tools, and Resources

Gather your resources and organize them to make your meal ideas easy to find and use. We all come across good ideas all the time, but we are so bombarded with information that we tend to forget them.

You can save time and eat a healthier diet by taking control of all those good ideas and translating them into a realistic day-to-day plan. Start by thinking of the foods you really want to have in your diet, and go from there to creating a master list of meal ideas. Then find recipes in cookbooks or online.

How we choose our meals is crucial to our diet and health. Yet it's easy to just leave it up to circumstance, and not really give it much thought. We can all benefit from spending a little time thinking about how we choose what is in our everyday diet and what to eat for any given meal. Do you wait until the last minute? Do you choose solely by what sounds good at the moment? Do you choose whatever is quickest? What if we planned our meals as thoughtfully as we plan some other areas of our lives or work, and made sure we had the tools and resources to accomplish the task well?

Here are some areas to examine:

• How do I decide what is in my diet? Conscious choice? Availability? Easiest and quickest?
• What guidelines do I use to choose what to buy when shopping for food? Price? Health? Taste? Do I need to prioritize my guidelines?
• Do members of my household agree on meal choices? How can we be more compatible?
• How do I organize my meal ideas? Keep lists? Mental notes?
• How do I organize my recipes? Box? Notebook? Drawer? Computer? Not at all?
• Is grocery shopping stressful for me? How do I organize my shopping list?
• Is it easy to find things in my pantry and refrigerator? Are they stocked with the foods I really want in my diet?
• Is preparing a meal a relaxed and enjoyable, or frantic and stressful? What can I change to make my choices and the process better and easier?

You might find that answering some of these questions can lead you not only to a consistently healthier diet, but to a more relaxed and efficient way of shopping and preparing meals.