How to Make Stress Free Healthy Dinners
Let's make meal planning and dinners creative, fun, TIME-SAVING, and stress-free!
Most people want to eat healthfully, feel healthy, and live healthfully. Even with the overwhelming desire to take one's health back, most find planning and preparing a chore or the throw away the plan after two nights. A typical weekly mealtime routine for many is to "wing it" for breakfast and rely on take-out for either lunch, dinner, or possibly both.
Why is this the case? Not enough time? Too hard to figure out what is healthy? The way to decrease the stress of making and eating healthy dinners for you and your family is to follow through on your weekly plan. When working with clients, we look at their weekly schedules and develop "The Game Plan." There are a couple of clients who have spent a couple of nights cooking with me via zoom.
Hello Freezer!
Your freezer is by far the best and most under-utilized aspect of the kitchen. Where else can you store the components of a healthy meal for months without spoilage? Healthy meals should always incorporate high-quality protein, healthy fats, and fiber from plenty of vegetables. Except for healthy fats (they're usually on your countertop or in the fridge), you can stock your freezer with high-quality protein and vegetables to ensure you always have nutrient-dense food available to plan and prepare healthy meals.
Avoid Decision Fatigue and Save Time
The process of meal planning takes away decision fatigue and stress at the dinner-making hour. Meal planning is the process in which you decide what meals you're having on what day (ex. Monday: Turkey Burgers with roasted sweet potatoes and salad, Tuesday: Salmon Bowls over Cauli Rice, Greens, and Avocado, Wednesday: Chicken Fajitas).
Some people will Batch Cook/Meal prep on one day for less cooking and prep time during the week. For example, you spend a few hours on Sunday cooking, setting yourself up for the week. Now that we've established the basics, let's get to your freezer.
So today, let's upgrade your freezer and make sure you always have healthy food available! The freezer will be your best friend in your meal planning and prep efforts.
While frozen vegetables typically get a bad rap, the truth is, they actually can be more nutritious than their fresh, grocery store counterparts! Frozen vegetables are picked at the height of their ripeness when they're bursting with vitamins and minerals¹. The process of flash freezing locks in those precious nutrients and halts the process of enzyme activity that begins to break down (and spoil) food.
When it comes to protein, there are some excellent services out there that ship high-quality frozen meat and wild-caught fish*, but you can also ask your local butcher or fishmonger to pack up your protein to go straight to the freezer. The benefit of having frozen protein, again, is that it won't spoil for quite some time, and you'll always have quality protein choices available. The one potential downside of frozen protein is the time it takes for said protein to defrost, but that's where a weekly plan comes in handy (or an instant pot to cook from frozen!).
The best way to start your meal planning efforts is to organize. If my ADHD brain can organize the week ahead, then you can too! Take inventory of what you have in the house, write it down, and match up days to meals. Going back to the example above, where we have a turkey burger on Monday and salmon on Tuesday, all you'd need to do is take both out of the freezer on Sunday to ensure they're defrosted and ready for cooking on their respective days. Frozen vegetables never requiring defrosting; they are ready when you need them.
The truth is, as you will hear me say on repeat,
“Nothing Happens Without Intention and Direction”
1. Munoz, Kissairis. “Frozen vs. Fresh Vegetables: Which Is Healthier?” Dr. Axe, 14 June 2021, draxe.com/nutrition/frozen-vs-fresh-vegetables/
* I use Butcher Box and Aldersprings Ranch (local Idaho Ranch that ships anywhere in the US) - No Affiliation