Master the Art of Meal Planning to Level Up Your Performance

We’d all love to have a private chef make us healthy, well-balanced meals every day, but finding and affording one is not always realistic. Despite the convenience, frequently eating out or ordering in is harmful to your waistline, energy levels, and brain capacity. Instead, taking the time to plan and prepare dishes is a high leverage move that can actually unlock your potential in more ways than one.

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Research shows that food has a direct impact on cognitive performance. To reap the benefits of this lifestyle, you don’t have to use too much time or brain power. Instead, you can batch prepare food days or weeks in advance that is good for your body and a more productive week. Keep reading to see our best advice on how to start or level up your meal planning journey.

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The Secret Weapon: Lists

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Like any good business practice, planning is often the key to set up projects for success. The main perk of meal planning is putting in a concentrated effort and getting a major reward. In order to gain both mental and physical benefits from this decision, we recommend you carve out time to plan ahead by writing down your weekly menu, then tackling your grocery list. To avoid any added pressure to your already busy schedule, you can reference online meal ideas or subscribe to clean eating magazines like Eating Well. Are you someone who needs variety in your meals, or can you eat the same thing everyday? Map out your meals for the week taking into consideration when you might have client dinners or lunch with the team. Think about variety not just in terms of flavor but also nutrients and diverse fruits and veggies. By going into your week with a plan, you can free up the mental space to focus on more important tasks in your work life and beyond.

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Prioritize Quality Over Quantity

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Heading out to the grocery store doesn’t need to be a dreaded task — think of it as an opportunity to play a role in your personal wellbeing. The quality of the food you purchase and consume matters for your health. To know which produce can be bought conventional based on low pesticide residues, reference the 2024 Clean Fifteen list. To know which ones you should always buy organic, look at the 2024 Dirty Dozen list (spoiler: some of your favorite fruits and veggies are likely on this list). This helps you make choices that are good for your health and good for your wallet. To avoid fatigue, try making your meal plan and shopping list the day before you go to the store. By breaking it up into different days, you might mitigate the feeling that food is monopolizing your day and you can more manageably fit this ritual into your plans.

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Meet Your Newest Sous Chef: AI

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If this process sounds a little daunting, you’re not alone. But just like you use technology to assist in your job, you can use it to inspire your meal planning creativity. If you can’t think of what to batch for lunches, ask Chat GPT. If you need three more dinners for the week, take a picture of the ingredients in your fridge and use Hellmann’s Meal Reveal tool to come up with recipe ideas. Whether you have a question about a product’s nutrients (try the Yuka app) or are stumped on what to make (explore recipes posted on Pinterest), there’s a technology tool to do the thinking for you. These habits are not just good for you — they’re good for the earth. Meal planning can also reduce food waste by properly estimating food consumption. With the added leverage of modern-day AI, home cooking doesn’t have to be as time consuming as we remember it to be.

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Get Halfway With Delivery Services

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If you’re like most people, you aren’t always proud of what you eat. That guilt can cause us to avoid making any steps toward progress. In 2012, Blue Apron emerged as a promising solution by offering a subscription-based meal delivery service for those who want to skip the planning and shopping to get right to the home cooking. Despite their demise, we haven’t seen any other competitors prevail in delivering organic, healthy, and fresh pre-measured ingredients for your recipes. If your current schedule doesn’t allow for meal planning and preparing time, try the Instacart plugin or if you just need to skip to the end, we like to select the meal delivery services Daily Harvest or Sakara Life that pass the quality test. You can also prioritize produce box deliveries directly from your local farms to ensure the food you eat is as fresh as possible. Being in a busy season at work doesn’t mean you have to compromise your health.

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Whether you’ve decided to go all in on this lifestyle change or are dipping your toes in the water, making any progress will benefit your health. By moving the needle toward better meal planning habits, you can stay at the top of your game.

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