7 reasons why family meal plans are good for you and your loved ones by FiveDinners.com
Family meal planning is easier said than done. Coming up with new meals daily can be hectic. After all, you have to maintain variety in the dishes, while making sure they’re healthy too. Family meal plans and meal plan ideas can help you stay one step ahead for better health, mindful eating and stress-free dinners.
Family meal plans help figure out recipes for every individual. Dietary needs vary for every family or person (which is why FiveDinners gives members the option to fully customise their meal plans for gluten free, vegetarian, low calorie and more! Try us for FREE here.) Family meal planning also helps to reduce the mental load giving you more quality time eating with family rather than spending it deciding what to cook.
And while it is mostly about food, it’s also about time and money. You and your family can turn around your entire lifestyle merely by planning meals. Here’s an overview.
Overview: The benefits of family meal plans
You’ll begin to see the advantages of family meal planning straight away.
- Planned meals cater to your family needs.
- Helps instill good eating habits with teenagers and growing children from the start, teaching them life skills in the kitchen.
- With the help of meal planning, you could save a lot of money spent on groceries.
- You have control over ingredients. Adjust the quantity of sugar and salt, depending on the needs and health concerns of your loved ones.
- Save money, time, and space by buying only what you need. It also means less food waste and landfills and wasting your cash on unwanted food.
- Say goodbye to undereating and overeating by having portions per person.
- Family meal plans allow you to explore dishes from all across the globe. So you’ll get to enhance your cooking skills and learn about the basic ingredients and cooking etiquette of various cultures.
- FiveDinners.com has hundreds of meal (growing daily) to cater to every taste!
Let’s dive into the details for each of the above.
1. Family members have various needs
Whether your family is big or small, every member’s health is important. Even within a family, nutritional needs will vary. For instance, if you are vegetarian you want to avoid certain ingredients but still have an awesome selection of vegetarian meals. On the other hand, even within a family, some people are more likely to eat larger or smaller portions than others, especially when you have kids and adults eating together.
Family meal plans can also help with the type of dishes. If someone in your clan doesn’t like spicy food you can leave out certain recipes. Taking care of these small requirements can go a long way when it comes to healthy eating and making sure everyone enjoys dinner.
Pro-tip: If you join FiveDinners.com you can customise your meal plans to meet the needs of everyone – meaning no more worrying whether food is gluten free or dairy free as you can specify that and only receive recipes that match your needs.
2. Children and teenagers will stay away from bad habits
Having healthier meals plans means getting into the habit of cooking from scratch simply put, that means eating better. For sure, teenagers are prone to eating junk food but learning life skills to cook and eating together as family will help lay the foundations for when they go out into the world on their own. With planned meals you’re helping your kids understand the benefits of a healthy and balanced diet.
Family meal plans are a great way to accommodate everyone in your household and help everyone eat better without the stress of last minute panic buying.
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3. Save a lot of money compared to unplanned meals
When your family meals are planned, so are your ingredients and so is your weekly shopping list. By having or creating family meal plans, you become clear about the quantity of each ingredient in your recipes. You save money by minimizing the amount you choose to spend. It’s a big advantage for the entire family and their needs. It also results in having only necessary items in the fridge, contributing to environmental sustainability.
Moreover, with family meal plans, you might be going for last-minute ready-meals or takeaways, and that could be expensive too. Even meal delivery kits; with excessive packaging and zero control of where you source your ingredients from can be super costly and removes some of the skill in learning to cook from scratch – especially when you want to adlib without a kit in from of you.
4. Avoid bad kitchen habits
Fussy eaters is common in young children. But give your kids a chance NOT to like something. If your child is fussy, try to get them involved in the cooking process, it’s amazing the difference it can make – so save time choosing what to eat and spend it cooking together – all helped by simply using a family meal plan.
In addition to that, meals cooked at home can give a lot of variety if you give them the chance – you might be surprised. Equally, homecooked food is just healthier than ready meals; they’re void of chemicals, you know exactly what goes into them and you can change that if you are accommodating any allergies or likes/dislikes. All in all, you’ll be amazed at how much family meal planning can help.
5. Meal planning enables full control over ingredients
In every/ dish, there are ingredients that you cannot rule out. Salt and sugar are the most common and they could affect blood pressure. For instance, adding too much salt can cause high blood pressure.
On the other hand, if someone in your family has low blood pressure issues, you might want to prepare exclusive low-salt dishes for them. And this could be hard to manage on your own, especially if you’re unaware of how recipes work.
But when you have planned meals, you’re cooking at home with guidance. You’ll have more knowledge of the basic ingredients, which also offers you more flexibility and control over them. Whatever the case, family meal plans help you achieve more balance.
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6. Explore dishes of all kinds
Having family meal plans doesn’t mean the dishes need to be repetitive. If a particular recipe suits your nutritional needs, you can include it in your plan. This dish could be from anywhere across the globe – maintaining variety is a major component of meal planning.
You could also turn this into a family activity. Get everyone involved in preparing the meals, so they could all learn about new recipes and the ingredients that make them delicious. It would be best especially for children as they could brush up their cooking skills from an early age.
7. Quality family time
We’re living in a fast-paced world, without a doubt. By the time we’re done with running errands and daily work commitments, there’s hardly any energy to get together with our loved ones.
But whether your day is busy or not, having meals is essential. So it provides the opportunity for everyone to gather at the table and spend quality time together. It’s not just about talking and entertainment, but such moments of togetherness have a drastic impact on mental health too.
Especially for growing children, combined support and nurturing of the family is important. It boosts their self-esteem, leading to more confidence not just in academic activities, but in general as well. Being a part of the group would help them feel wanted, resulting in better mental health overall.
Pro-tip: And if you have many relatives coming over for dinner, you would need to be swift with your meal preparation. What better than having your family meal plans come to the rescue? You could cherry-pick some recipes in advance for a scenario like this.
So is there a downside to family meal plans?
Not really. The only disadvantage to family meal plans is that if you do them on your own, they could become monotonous with time. You could end up repeating the same dishes every week in a month, searching for hours for some inspiration, then I won’t even go into making your own shopping list from five different recipes!
Let us at FiveDinners do the hard work for you – we create and test all the recipes, put them into neat categories for you to choose from, specify how many you are cooking for and then with one click of a button you’ll have your entire shopping list for the week – now that is handy!!
To make sure meal planning works out for you, try a FiveDinners subscription FREE for 14 days here. We’ll help you build your family meal plan from scratch. Of course, keeping in mind the distinct needs of you and your loved ones.
Conclusion
All in all, family meal plans go beyond dishes and drinks. Keeping individual needs in mind, help you become healthier and more active. You also save money by spending only on the items you need in your fridge. In turn, this also results in lesser food waste, thus being the most eco-friendly meal planning option out there.
Family meal planning also helps in promoting quality time activities. You could get all your family members involved in cooking the meals. From children to the elderly, everybody could benefit from boosting their skills in the kitchen and advancing their knowledge of various recipes.
About FiveDinners
Join thousands of others at FiveDinners.com today and start making your dinnertimes stress-free and fun; get a new meal plan every week, fully customisable to your preferences with our one-click shopping list. Oh and you can text us for real-time help in the kitchen (bit like having your own private chef on standby!). Try us FREE for 14 days.