5 reasons you should plan your meals in advance

With today’s busy lifestyles, eating homecooked food can be a challenge. Longer work days, long commute, managing office with household chores often takes a toll on eating healthy due to lack of time. As a result, we all end up making poor food choices due to lack of planning! Dietitian Akansha Jhalani from Bon happétee tells you why you should start planning your meals.

1. Helps you add more nutrients to your diet– Planning your meals well ahead of time helps you take control of your personal nutritional needs. You can eat a variety of nutritious foods and shop for them before in hand. There are rare chances of you reaching out to convenience foods like ready to eat foods, quick fixes like biscuits, cakes and all junk. It can be a good idea to maintain a food diary where you plan all your meals in advance.

2. Helps you make right food choices--Do you know your week ahead is going to be busy? Planning meals at the beginning of the week or a day before based on your schedule will ensure you eat a healthy meal in any case. This ensures you have well planned satiating meals when you have most hunger pangs, and eat the right food combinations to deal with the stress and exertion. And, if you get this right, your weight loss concerns are taken care.

3. Prevents bloating and acidity –Bloating and other digestion related problems are due to untimely meals which are an outcome of inadequate planning. So if you plan your meals well in advance, you will have fewer chances of suffering from bloating and acidity.

4. Prevents you from overeating – One tends to overeat only when you ignore hunger. Meal planning takes care of the timings, and there are no hunger pangs. This ultimately helps you eat just the right quantity required at one go. You end up feeling not only satiated but so much lighter and energetic by doing so. Here are 50 common mistakes Indians make while cooking healthy food. 

5. Leaves no room for cheat meals –It’s ok to cheat once in a while! But what if cheating becomes a habit? It makes you put on a lot of weight. If you are successful at planning your meals right, there are high chances of you sticking to the week-long commitment! Here’s what Bollywood actresses eat on their cheat days. 

You can use these applications to plan your meals well:
• Yummly is a mobile app and website that provides recipe recommendations personalised to the individual’s tastes. Yummly allows users to search by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, meal courses and sources.
• MyFitnessPal is a free smartphone app and website that tracks diet and exercise to determine optimal caloric intake and nutrients for the users’ goals and uses gamification elements to motivate users.
• bon happetee is a chef and nutritionist rolled in one mobile app – with customized daily meal plans and real-time nutrition analysis with meal scores that can help you plan, evaluate and fix your meals with a convenience of a click.