This is Part 4 of a 5-part blog series about sticking to a healthy-eating routine that is sustainable even on a budget and when you’re busy. To start at the beginning of the blog series, click here.

I have my fair share of nights when we wrap up a long day of work and I sigh, “Can we just go out to eat?”

There’s nothing wrong with going out to eat. I love going out to eat. But when we get into a routine of going out to eat because we’re “too busy” or “too tired” to cook, it only takes a couple days before we start feeling the effects of eating for convenience versus maintaining a consciously healthy diet. It’s an ongoing struggle — and it will probably have its ebbs and flows for the rest of our lives, because honestly, some days we can’t stand the thought of creating a pile of dirty dishes. Who’s with me?!

In the last couple years, we have found a few things that really curb our need/desire to grab food on the go quite as often, and while I can’t say these have completely revolutionized our eating habits so we never want to eat out, these steps have made a big impact on our level of preparedness throughout the workweek — and our overall willingness to cook healthy meals instead of dining out day after day.

Pre-plan your menu and buy all your ingredients before the workweek begins
As I mentioned in the last blog post, pre-planning meals for the week is important for budgetary reasons — but it’s just as important in making sure you actually get around to cooking. Already having meals chosen for each day and making sure you have the necessary ingredients on hand removes a big mental hurdle to fixing dinner at the end of the day.

Double your recipes and make use of leftovers
Almost every time I cook, I make way more food than Danny and I need for our meal, then seal most of it up and pop several meals’ worth of leftovers into the refrigerator or freezer. I do this with individual ingredients, like meat (cook a whole package; use one third or half for the recipe, freeze the rest so that it’s ready to drop into another recipe next week), and with one-dish meals, too. I can’t overstate how convenient — and encouraging, when you’re tired and it’s already 7:00 at night — it is to have some of your ingredients pre-cooked. And leftover meals? They’re how we make lunch happen around here, and they’re how I promise myself I won’t have to cook every night, even if we aren’t eating out.

Work a little on the weekend so you work less during the week
A few weeks ago, I spent part of my Sunday afternoon chopping tons of veggies and frying tofu and cooking lentils, and separating them into containers in the refrigerator. When I was finished, I had most of my week’s ingredients ready — to dump in the wok for a stir fry, pour onto a baking sheet for roasting, and heat and serve over lettuce for salad. It was a little bit of extra work when I could have been doing something else (but I had Netflix on, so I was technically still relaxing…). The payoff was that my hands-on cooking time that week was almost nothing, and we still had home-cooked dinners every night.

Turn cooking into an adventure…
Trying something new, for me at least, makes cooking feel less like repetitive work and more like playtime in the kitchen. Something as simple as deciding to ditch the dried spices one night, buying a whole turmeric root, and grating it (fair warning: wear gloves or you too will have orange fingers for days) can turn preparing a meal into something I get excited about. You may not feel the same way about fresh turmeric root. It’s an admittedly strange thing to get excited about. So just figure out what makes cooking fun and adventurous for you, and keep your own tricks up your sleeve for evenings when cooking otherwise feels like a marathon chore.

… and also keep your favorite, simple, go-to recipes close at hand
In our house, we have a few recipes that are not only pure (mostly healthy) comfort food, but require just a few minutes of hands-on time. I typically include one of these recipes in each week’s menu, because it guarantees me a night when I can cook with my brain in standby mode. I highly recommend it . . . and that’s what I’ll be blogging about next week!~ Laura