How To Stay On Track With Your Meal Plan Even During The Holidays

Holiday parties, gatherings and treats can be an easy way to derail any health goals you are working towards. A plate of gingerbread cookies can often look too tempting to pass up. Meal planning can be a helpful way to stay on track even during the busy, and tasty, holiday season. But how do you stay on track with your meal plan? Here are several tips for how to stay on track with your meal plan even during the holidays.

The first tip for staying on track with your meal planning is to make sure you’ve planned a collection of recipes that you truly enjoy. Particularly during the holidays when there are so many tempting food offerings, you want to ensure that your meal plan is appealing and doesn’t feel like drudgery to eat. It can also be helpful to add one or two extra fun meals to your plan so that you have something to look forward to each week.

Another tip to help you successfully meal plan and stay on track during the holidays is to prepare some of your ingredients over the weekend. During the busy holiday season if you don’t prep ahead of time it can be easy to run out of time and abandon your meal plan. Instead, you could prepare some chicken or chop vegetables ahead of time so that when it comes time to prepare the meal, you already have some of your ingredients ready to go. This way, you can get straight to cooking and are more likely to stay on track. 

Since staying on track with your meal plan can be difficult you can also come up with a creative reward system. Maybe you can enjoy a particular movie at the end of the week if you stuck with your meal plan for the whole week. Or maybe there is a certain purchase you’ve been wanting to make and you could save that for the end of the month as a reward for staying on track all month. 

One final suggestion for staying on track with your meal plan during the holidays is to delegate parts of the planning. Assign each family member a day of the week where they need to plan and prepare the meal. This can be an opportunity for each family member to plan a fun and creative meal, which is particularly fun during the holiday season. You could also have each family member choose a meal based on a particular theme.

With some careful planning and preparation you can successfully meal plan and stay on track, even during the holiday season.