Healthy Habit No. 13: Plan

"Failing to plan is planning to fail"  

~Proverb quote

There is, perhaps, no better word in the English language to better illustrate how you can incorporate healthy habits into your everyday life.

Planning

A little planning goes a long way.  Eating healthy never happens by accident.  For the most part, neither do fitness, skin protection, healthy teeth, weight loss, and social ties. Many of these habits take effort that need to be scheduled into busy lives.

To eat healthy, for example, it would help to set aside time to draft a menu, make a grocery list, go to the store, prepare meals, and pack breakfast and lunch.

A friend teases me each Saturday morning at breakfast while I do our calendar list the planned events of the week, coordinate with my wife on our dinners for the week and write out our grocery list before heading to the store.  This was one of the tough life lessons learned.  We still make changes to our menu, but we can accommodate those quickly and reschedule meals. 

Another part of the planning is getting healthy recipes and scaled to a more reasonable number.   With just the two of us, that can become a challenge in books, back of boxes, etc.  We found some excellent sites online that make it really easy to figure out what ingredients we need and how much, just by simply put in 2 for the number of servings. And, bless their hearts, it also provide the nutritional information, for those of us tracking such things.  While there are several sites available, I use All Recipes more often than the other sites.  I enjoy reading the comments on how other people make adjustments to the basic recipe and the outcome.  Cooking light, Weight Watchers and Spark Recipes are also excellent sites, along with The Pioneer Woman.

One additional note regarding cooking and planning – we discovered last year a wonderful invention – Steamer Bags for the microwave! Not only does it make steaming your veggie a snap, it is also great for cooking meat.  All in just a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.  That’s especially good news after one of those long, hard days in the office or the terrible commute home or both.

This article concludes the 13 Healthy Habits for Life, we will continue to update and expand upon these healthy habits and others in the coming weeks and months ahead.  Please feel free to submit your comments and recommendations – we always enjoy hearing from our readers.