10 Simple Tips To Organize Your Kitchen & You For Healthy Eating

These 10 simple tips to organize your kitchen will have you and your family eating healthy without feeling overwhelmed. In fact, eating healthy doesn’t have to be complicated; it requires three key elements:

Getting organized
Shopping the outside aisles of the grocery store
Getting back into the kitchen

Tip: Tackle a little at a time, get your feet wet, and before you know it, you’ll be cooking and eating healthy meals faster than you can go through the drive-through (OK, maybe not that fast, but you get what I mean)

Getting Organized

1.Set an intention or goal:

Getting clear on why you want to make this change and setting clear goals will help you stay on track when things get busy.

Don’t forget to write it down! And re-visit it whenever you’re feeling unmotivated.

2.Clean and Declutter your kitchen:

When your kitchen is cluttered, it’s easier to make excuses like “I don’t have enough workspace to prep my food,” or “I need a bigger kitchen to do this,” or “I’ve had a long day, and I don’t feel like digging out the blender in the back of my cupboard.”

Any of these sound familiar?

A clean and decluttered kitchen will make it easier to for you to cook.

3.Re-organize your kitchen for quick and easy access:

Re-organize your kitchen around your workspace. If you’re using the food processor, make it accessible; put it at the front of your cupboard, so you don’t have to move anything to get to it.

Keep all your measuring tools in the same drawer so they are easily accessed. You don’t want to be digging through other utensils trying to find what you need. Everything you require daily should be within arm’s length or be able to easily grab.

Check out my blog on 10 Steps to an Organized Kitchen if you want even more tips to organize your kitchen (in depth).

4.Create a system for yourself.

Create a system for yourself that includes when you’ll sit down to create a meal plan (e.g., Sunday morning before anyone wakes up).

It should also include creating a grocery list.

Tip: keep a grocery list in the top drawer beside the fridge with a pen. Tell everyone where to find the grocery list so it can be added to it as needed.

You’ll also want to figure out when you or another family member will be doing groceries and schedule time for that.

A well-thought-out system creates a routine that develops into habits.

Habits mean less room for excuses.

5.Meal planning

Start out easy; try to incorporate meals that you’ve been cooking for years that don’t require a lot of thought. You’ll also want to look for 30-minute recipes or recipes with only a few ingredients for those busy nights that require very little prep. Leave the longer, more involved recipes for weekends when you have more free time.

Tips for meal planning– Create a two week plan of meals you will be cooking. Double or triple your batch so you can freeze a meal or two for another day. Remember to make a note for yourself to take it out of the freezer the night before!

Note when you’ll be prepping the ingredients if it’s a different day from cooking the meal.

Note who will be prepping the ingredients and cooking if it’s someone other than you, and note what time you want the cooking to begin.

These may seem tedious, but you don’t want to leave anything to chance when you have an already busy schedule.

Try using a meal planning app – Of course, you can use good ol’ paper for your system or a combination of both. There are recipe apps that allow you to save directly from a site, so you don’t have to copy-paste or re-write it into the app or onto a paper.

Shopping the outside aisles of the grocery store

6.You’ve made your system, created a two-week meal plan, and now it’s time to shop.

Shopping the grocery store’s perimeter ensures you’re eating whole food, nutritionally based meals because this is where all the fresh produce, meat, and dairy are.

7.Wash and prep your groceries:

Wash your produce to remove dirt and toxic chemicals from pesticides.

Prep and measure any ingredients needed for upcoming meals. Don’t skip this step; it’s such a great time saver, and you’ll thank your future self, I promise.

Getting back into the kitchen

8.Read through the entire recipe:

Have you ever started cooking a new recipe and realized that you’ve forgotten something or missed a step because you didn’t thoroughly read through the recipe.

Take a few minutes and read through the ingredients and the directions. I also highly recommend reading the notes and even comments if your recipe is online.

9. Have everything ready before you start cooking

Go through the recipe and take out all ingredients before you start creating your meal. Have everything out so you can quickly grab it when you need it. Also, have your measuring spoons, measuring cups, bowls and anything else out that you will need out and ready to go. You can be doing all this while your oven is heating up.

10.Re-use the meal plan weekly, biweekly or monthly:

Depending on how often you can tolerate eating the same meal, you’ll want to re-use these recipes on future meal plans.

As you will see, meal planning will become easier as you go because you’ll be re-using previous meal plans and only adding one or two new recipes here and there.

Conclusion

The critical piece of advice here is to get organized. You’ll never use the food processor if it’s buried in the back of a cluttered cupboard.

Trying something new is always a little challenging, especially after the novelty wears off. But the more organized you are, the easier it is to perform the task and the harder it is to make excuses. Set yourself up for success right out of the gate.

I hope these simple tips to organize your kitchen will help guide you to reaching your goals.

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