When you’re a parent, life passes by quickly. Before you know it, your son and daughter will be teenagers. Because life passes by so quickly, you’ll have to make a real effort to eat right… otherwise, you simply may not live long enough to see your grandchildren. Diabetes, cancer and heart disease are on the rise and unless you take specific efforts to eat right, you’ll suffer the consequences. So decide right now that meal planning really is important and vital for you in every part of your life.

Actual amounts of foods you’ll need for a week are always based on your age, height, weight and weight goals. A man who’s over 6 foot 3 inches tall can eat a pound of meat a day and stay healthy; a woman who’s barely 5 feet tall needs only about half that amount to stay healthy.

Here are some meal planning guidelines that will make your life easier:

1. Center your meals around high-quality protein sources

High quality protein sources include such as grass-fed beef, antibiotic-free and hormone-free chicken and turkey, mercury-free fish, cage-free eggs, and dairy products like kefir milk, yogurt and lastly milk. Building your menu around protein is a lot easier and wiser than building it around any other food in the diet. A minimum serving is 3 oz. cooked protein. A maximum could be 7 oz. if you’re very tall or very large-framed; the bodybuilder type.

2. Add vegetables to lunch & dinner.

Choose three vegetables; keep it simple. Two vegetables should be non-starchy (tomatoes, lettuce, onions, leeks, green beans, asparagus, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower…) and one can be starchy (peas, corn, acorn squash, potatoes)

3. Next add a whole grain.

Now this can be a little tricky. If you have to lose weight, then don’t have a starchy vegetable plus a grain! It wouldn’t make sense because that would be too many carbohydrates.

4. Add a tablespoon of oil or fat.

This could mean 8 nuts or a teaspoon of olive oil or butter or a quarter of an avocado. And this is tricky: don’t do it every meal. Skip a meal every once in awhile. You’ll get plenty of fat in other foods; that’s why you can skip every once in awhile.

5. Add a beverage.

Of course water would be the best option. However a vegetable juice and a fruit juice would be a secondary choice. Try to always read the labels of any store bought juices as they are often high in unnecessary sugar.

6. Add a fruit for dessert.

Once in a while, say two days a week, plan on a serving of special dessert.

7. Consider leftovers in your meal planning.

It’s best to plan out your meals on paper for the week. When you are planning consider leftovers. For example, a chicken can give you several meals:

• 2 breasts =2 meals
• 2 legs plus thighs = 2 meals
• 2 wings plus breast meat = 2 meals
• scraps will probably give you another meal or two.

That’s a total of at least 7 servings from that chicken or two days worth of meals for Mum and Dad. Don’t drag out leftovers. For example, don’t cook a chicken and then only eat one meal a day for the rest of the week. It’s too easy to end up with spoiled food that is wasted.

Following these guidelines will make your life easier, and keep your waistline trimmer as well.

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