Meal-Plan Your Way to Weight Loss by Rebecca Burnicle and Wendy Van Staden, published by Macmillan Australia, RRP $39.99, photography by Jeremy Simons.

My View:

Some great advice that I intend to start following. Once I did meal plan, it made shopping, cooking and my day easier. It’s time to focus on things that work to make our busy lives easier. I will share some quick and easy recipes from this book in the next few days.

“There are ways to get even more bang for your meal-planning buck, including this handful of ideas:
Make the effort to choose recipes and meals that include some of the same ingredients or components, so you can prep and cook once to enjoy several different meals across the week. This could be cooked lentils, roast vegetables or poached chicken breast.

You can use the ‘ingredient’ index at the back of this cookbook to easily find recipes that have foods in common.

Create a plan that’s a little bit flexible. Depending on your preferences (and your personality!), being
able to switch and swap a few meals across the week, to cater to what you genuinely feel like
eating on any given day rather than being too rigid about what you have to eat, when, can help
you stick with the plan.

Choose recipes that you want and like to eat. Sure, kale, fish and chickpeas are good for you,
but if you genuinely don’t like the taste of those ingredients, it’s best not to choose recipes for
your meal plan that rely too heavily on them. Incorporate recipes that feature your ZeroPoint
foods if you’re a WW member. You chose them for a reason – because you like them! So when you
do this, you not only tick the box outlined above, you’ll be making the most of your Personal Points
Budget, too.

Make sure at least one or two (or three!) of the recipes in your meal plan are quick-fire ones so
that when your day is busier than expected, you can still create something healthy and delicious,
regardless of how much prep you have or haven’t been able to do beforehand. Check out the prep
and cooking times included on every recipe in this book to guide you.

HOW TO PREP FOR SUCCESS
Once you’ve planned your meals, the next step is prepping ahead of time to make it as easy as
possible to cook those meals. Depending on the ingredients and what suits you best, you can
either set aside a specific time to do this prep or simply incorporate it into the cooking process for a
particular recipe. Either way, once you start thinking about it, your prepping options are endless, but for
some inspiration, you could:

Chop up ingredients ahead of time. Again, you can either set aside a time to do this or whenever
you’re preparing meat, plant-based proteins or veggies for one meal, simply chop and divide
up more so that you have them ready to go, for another meal.

Totally stretched for time? When it comes to vegetables, the frozen variety are great to have on hand. They’re nutritious, pre-chopped and you can cook them straight from frozen.

Cook up double – or triple – batches of those ingredients that the recipes you’ve chosen have in common. Depending on how many days it’ll be until you’ll use them again, you can either store
them in the fridge or pop them in the freezer (turn over the page for freezing tips). After cooking,
‘leftover’ ingredients last for two or three days in the fridge.

Make sure your fridge, freezer and pantry is well organised. The way it’s structured only has to
make sense to you, but being able to put your hands on the ingredients you need quickly is vital
to making the meal-prep and cooking process as easy and enjoyable as possible.” p.15