We have five more days to prep for the new year! Five days fly so fast anymore it sounds like nothing, but in reality it’s about 60 useable hours. That’s enough time to develop a plan even if you can’t implement it before the new year. Much of my planning will have to be while my hands do the laundry, bed making, and mopping from having houseguests for the past 10 days. That’s okay. Household tasks are less annoying when my mind is busy working something out.
For 2025, I don’t have any plan to change what I’m eating, but I want to create a better flow for food preparation. I don’t really mean a better flow when cooking a dish. I have that down. I mean for the bigger picture – shopping and meal prep.
The busier I am, the more I like to have grab-ready food. To minimize use of processed food, I must cook in advance.
This lends itself to choosing a day or two per week to prep meals that last through the other days. It also means kitchen clean-up is minor except for days that I cook. Sounds easy, but a lack of predictability in my schedule has made it routinely difficult to set aside certain days for cooking.
Another option is to prepare two meals at the same time every other day. That gives me variety for lunches and minimizes the clean-up on off days.
A third, and hard for me to embrace option, is to use my freezer. I’m not good at this. I know I’m not good at it. But it certainly facilitates what I’m trying to accomplish so it’s worth full consideration.
When I factor in shopping, options one and three work best. But before I decide to fill the freezer, I feel like I should use my five days to determine whether the discipline using the freezer will require adds significantly more stress than option one.
All discipline creates a level of stress. Up to a point, stress is stimulating and good. Past that point, it is detrimental and worth considering when creating plans. In fact, the fastest path to the failure of a plan may be a lack of exploration of the feelings that will accompany its implementation.
If you are not prepared for the discomfort, annoyance, and frustration of change, it will be much harder to sustain. If you haven’t anticipated how much change you can handle at one time, you’ll be likely to try a leap that will fail than a step that will stick.
The big take-away is that prepping for the new year is a good thing to do, and your plans will be more likely to succeed if you lower the bar to a point that is manageable. You can always build from there.
So, lower the bar, have some fun, and move into 2025 knowing you’re prepared for success!