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MEET THE KROCKS: We are a married couple who started on a life-changing whole food, plant-based weight loss journey in June 2018. To date, we have lost over 240 pounds combined and we aren’t done yet! Read Our Story
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When trying to make a complete lifestyle change, organization is key! Your tendency will be to gravitate backwards to your old patterns and habits, so staying organized and prepared for any situation will help you stay on track. Here are some of our best tips for organizing your meal prep calendar and weekly grocery list:
1. Keep a binder of all your favorite recipes, whether they are photocopied from cookbooks, printed from online sources or handwritten versions of your own creations. When you aren’t sure what you want to make for the week ahead, you can look through this book to get ideas. We like to photocopy our favorite recipes from the cookbooks we own. This way we can keep them in a separate binder with all of our other recipes, write notes on them and not worry about getting the actual books messy while cooking.
2. Put a magnetic calendar on your refrigerator to organize your meals for each week. You can plan these out a few weeks in advance or week-by-week. We only write our lunches on our calendar, since usually eat the same thing for breakfast most days (recipe video coming soon!) and we eat a giant salad for dinner almost every single night.
3. Keep a “master grocery list” of all the things you buy on a regular basis. This way, you can run through that list before you go shopping and see what you need to buy. This document is something you will need to keep updating as your staple items may change over time or with the seasons. When you are ready to narrow down your list for the week, first go through the “staples” you like to keep on hand and cross out any items you don’t need. After you decide what you’ll eat for the coming week, add any special items you need for that week’s recipe(s).
You can download our master grocery list and customize it to fit your needs!
Choose one to download:
PDF | Word Document (so you can customize)
4. I prefer to have a “clean” shopping list when I go to the store. Instead of printing the list out and crossing off items, I normally bring my laptop into the kitchen and open the “Master” list and save a copy of it. I name the new file using the date of the upcoming shopping trip. Then, I go through and delete items I know I don’t need for that week and type in any extra items. Just make sure you save a copy of the “Master” list somewhere and don’t accidentally save over it with your edited list. After you are done, print out your nice clean list for that week and head to the store!
5. BATCH COOK & FREEZE! If you find a recipe you love, make sure you DOUBLE or even triple the recipe next time you make it. This way you can freeze the extra portions and spend less time in the kitchen. We find that most soups freeze well. We store extras in glass Pyrex bowls in the freezer and then move them to the refrigerator for a few days when we are ready to thaw. Just be careful not to overfill your glass bowls, leave plenty of room at the top for expansion and handle with care! If you drop a glass bowl that is frozen, it will shatter much easier (not that we’ve had experience with that 😉).
6. Use weekends to test out new recipes or make “one off” meals that don’t work as well for batch cooking (like veggie pizza or tacos). There might be a recipe you want to try out but aren’t ready to batch cook, and weekends are the perfect time to experiment! We try to do all of our cooking/prepping during the weekend, so we don’t have to cook after a long day at work.
7. Pick one day to plan out your calendar and another day to go through your pantry and put together your list. This way, you aren’t spending a huge chunk of time on this. Eventually you will get into a routine. We like to plan the calendar on Wednesday, make the grocery list on Thursday and head to the grocery store on Saturday morning.
8. Organize your grocery list to make your shopping trips more efficient! Right now our grocery list is organized by sections of the store (i.e. pantry, freezer, fresh fruits/veggies, refrigerator), but I have been playing around with re-organizing it by store. I usually go to Aldi, Trader Joe’s & Whole Foods each week and typically buy certain things at each store, so I think organizing by store might be beneficial. Back in the day when I was shopping ONLY at Aldi, I actually had my list organized by the layout of the store… yes, I have OCD! 🙂
Do you have any tips to share? Comment below and let us know what works for you!
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