If you have been reading this blog for a while you would know that I am a stay at home mom of two little girls. One is two and the other is four. They eat a ton of fruits and veggies but not so much meat. I also have my husband that works twelve hour shifts at a factory. He is also diabetic so we need to avoid too much bread or sweets with him, and have everything in a very good balance. In the diabetic balance he also needs lots of protein and calories. This makes meal planning take several hours for me to do a week. Mostly finding new recipes to keep things exciting.
I have been using the mealgarden meal planning app for the last two weeks. I actually did the full meal plan this week. It was so easy and fun. I just plugged my favorite recipes into it by typing them into their system. I was also able to find some really good recipes in their cookbook that they already had in the system. I even put my own unique recipe on there for my skinny pancakes. It took me a few hours to fill in the meal plan but most of that was looking for new recipes and plugging them into their system. I even messed up and put everything onto the wrong week on the calender because I was tired from working with my girls. It only took about ten minutes to put everything into the correct week’s place.
The nutrition part of it is awesome. I thought I was doing really badly with my meals because I put my dinners in first and they contain a lot of red meat, and it actually made me think more health conciously as I was plugging the rest of the meals in, and my family could potentially be eating more healthy because of it. As I plugged meals with more veggies or fruits in them my overall mealplan health rating went from red (unhealthy) to green (healthy). I could see this tool potentially helping me plan healthier meals than ever before for my family. I have never been too health concious of a person, and even with my husband’s diabetes we still don’t eat perfectly. All of that could change if I keep using this app.
The shopping list part of the app is really cool too. The fact that you can change the measurements for shopping reasons is so cool and really helps with the pricing of items. Also the fact that you can email your list to anyone is super helpful. If one of my girls gets sick I can just email the list to my husband and he could look it up on his phone and grab the things we need without stopping home to get a grocery list. This feature is so convenient. It really is one of the most useful parts of the app for me. It would take mere seconds to get the list sent out and then cuddle with my sick girl again.
I have a few others things in my mind that this app could improve on. The first one is to track beverages as well. If you drink the wrong things your calories will go up and your health benefits decrease. They would just need to open a new meal slot labled beverages. Along on this note since the app is already doing health of food it would be pretty cool if it could add the nutritional facts of your whole meal plan all together and then also have a daily section that would be really cool and would benefit a dieter like I am. I lost a lot of weight this year and I think something like that would really help me continue to lose weight, and I might even switch out some meals in the plan with others for calorie or health reasons. The other thing I wish they did was to make the meal plans you create shareable with the click of a button, maybe to just other users of the app that would be really cool. It would be fun to see what other users are eating.
That is what I think of this amazing app and how it can be improved. I suggest that you give it a try, because it really does save me a ton of time, money and makes me eating habits more healthy. Thank you for reading this.
Nicole
bobbiedaisy 