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Have you ever wondered if you should try meal planning? Stay tuned because I've got five reasons why you should get started now. Hi, I'm Jamie Riene, and I teach you how to work smarter, not harder, so you have time to show up for the things you love. Okay.

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So our new series, meal planning for beginners - today, we are going to go over five reasons to get started now. So I'm assuming that, you know, just kind of a broad overview of what meal planning is. And that's basically just having a plan for your meals throughout the week. And the number one reason to do that is decision fatigue. We spend more time making decisions now than at any other time in history. There's actually a reason while you only saw SteveJobs in a black turtleneck it's because that's all he decided to wear so that he could remove that one decision from his life and, you know, maintain his brain capacity to make other decisions.

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We can do that same thing with our meals, because whenever we think ahead and we plan and we eliminate those last minute decisions, we tend to make better choices. Reason number two, it's a lot healthier to cook at home. According to a study at John Hopkins, people who cook at home consume far fewer calories than those who don't. So just the sheer amount of control that you have over your food. Whenever you're cooking at home, you can control the amount of sugar, the amount of salt, the added cholesterol, all of those things that wind up in fast food and in restaurant food. You get to control that whenever you are eating at home more frequently and meal planning, is part of that process. This third reason you should be meal planning is because whenever you have a plan it's visible to your whole family, which means that you get to ask for help.

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So instead of everybody always coming to you and saying, mom, mom, mom, like what's for dinner, what's for dinner, you can actually print it out or put it on a dry erase board or something like that on your refrigerator. And you can, you know, just have family help you, you know, is there any prep work that they can do? Is there anything that they can make on their own? If you have small children, even just finding something that they can do in the kitchen to help you cook dinner means that they're more likely to eat it as well. So there's lots of bonds that are formed in around food and cooking and having the family help you. So don't be afraid to ask for help whenever you have a plan that makes it way easier. So you can really learn to dictate - no delegate. So if this is making sense to you, go ahead and give this video a thumbs up and let's move on to number four. So number four is saving time. Like how many times do you walk in? And you're just like trying to figure out like what to cook for dinner? 5:30, 6 o'clock it's not the best time to try to figure that out. So what helps is if you have a plan and you can save the time instead of

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Spending so much mental energy meal planning is kind of like batch working. If it's something like that, you spent the mental energy like one time and you don't have to think about it throughout the rest of the week. So you eliminate the decision fatigue and you also save yourself some time. So number five is saving money. The amount of money that you spend it's just there's no...it's just not comparable. So a $4 pasta meal at home is going to cost you $20 at a restaurant. And over, you know, there's been lots of studies on this. It averages out that it is five times more expensive to eat out versus eating at home. So to recap, number one is to eliminate decision fatigue. Number two is to have healthier meals. Number three is so that you can ask for help. Whenever you have a schedule, number four, you save time. Number five, you save money. If you enjoyed this video, you'll love my new workshop. Get your together. 30 minutes to a digital meal plan. The details are in the description below. Thanks for watching. Be sure to like and subscribe. So you get notified of new videos every week.