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Decision fatigue is real. It’s estimated that the average American adult makes 35,000 decisions a day! That’s a lot of things vying for your attention and stealing your energy throughout the day. Food decisions are especially draining because they don’t stop. Every day involves multiple rounds of deciding what to eat, what to cook, what ingredients you need, and whether you have the time or energy to make it happen. Meal planning is the solution to eliminating decision fatigue around food and reducing your overall mental load.
Meal planning involves deciding what to eat for the week ahead and shopping for ingredients. You don’t need to plan every meal, but you do want an idea of what you’ll be cooking and eating throughout the week. Often breakfasts and lunches don’t need recipes planned because they revolve around staple items like eggs, cottage cheese, and sandwich makings.
A meal plan doesn’t mean making recipes from scratch or even always cooking; some dinners can be planned as “leftover night” or “pick up pizza”. Eating leftovers, pulling pre-made foods from the freezer, and getting take-out all count as part of a meal plan.
Grocery shopping is important too because that’s what ensures you have all those staple items and ingredients for your planned recipes. A comprehensive and organized list helps you have one grocery trip for the week, and it reduces even more decisions you have to make! When you shop with a list, you have a direction of what to buy at the store, rather than deciding at the moment what looks or sounds good.
How meal planning reduces decision fatigue.
If you’re deciding what to eat every night at 5 pm, you’ve already spent so much mental energy during the day on work, parenting, emails/texts/calls, scheduling, etc., that figuring out what to eat is hard. With a meal plan, you make the choices up front, so when it comes time to make dinner, you can simply follow the plan and not think about it.
Meal planning not only reduces fatigue around deciding what to eat, but it also reduces the other “micro-decisions” around food, too. These are questions like, “Do I need to stop at the grocery store after work?”, or “Do I have time to cook this tonight?”, and “Will anyone eat this?”. Those questions go away because you’ve taken the time to plan around your schedule, pick recipes your family likes, and you went grocery shopping to get everything you need.
Decision fatigue can lead to more impulsivity because your decision-making muscles are drained. So waiting until the end of the day to decide what to eat can lead to getting takeout and fast food more often than you’d like. People often make different choices when tired than they would have made earlier in the day, or earlier in the week! Having a plan means you don’t have to make a rushed decision on what’s for dinner because you decided ahead of time.
Get the most out of your meal plan.
To keep the planning process simple, repeat meals you know your family loves and sprinkle in a couple of new recipes every month. There’s no reason to stress about having variety in your plans – the goal is to get food on the table! If you do like to keep variety in your meals, changing your meal rotation with the seasons is a great way to keep things simple while reducing boredom.
You can also try assigning themes to each night of the week to guide your planning. You can use themes based around a protein or main ingredient, cuisine, or fun alliterations like “Taco Tuesday”, “Meatless Monday”, and “Sandwich Saturday”. Choose themes that help you pick a recipe without much deliberation.
You also don’t have to meal plan alone! Involve your family in the planning process to offload some of the decisions and get new ideas for recipes. Or text a friend and ask them for some recipe inspiration.
Finally, it’s a good idea to keep the meal plan visible and easy to reference. Having the meal plan written down at home on a whiteboard or sticky note makes it hard to manage and check in. Use a meal planning app, like Plan to Eat, that you can share with your family and have access to right on your phone!
We can’t take away all the decisions we have to make during the day, but we can take action to reduce our mental load around food and meal times. Creating a meal plan and grocery shopping for what you need saves your brain from having to start from scratch when dinnertime rolls around. Rather than scrambling and feeling flustered, you’ll feel calm and prepared, knowing you already made those decisions and have what you need to follow through on the plan.
