Hi Joann! Glad to see your posting. Welcome! I have been focusing on balanced meals and have more or less followed weight watchers. I discovered a FREE EXCELLENT site that offers all of the same features as Weight Watchers online - complete with menus, support, forums and you choose the speed of weight you want to lose. The biggest factor in my slow weight loss (32 pounds over the last 3 years) has been drinking water to flush my system, walking and eating a well balanced diet. My weakness is bread/starchy foods. I have to make an effort to add the fruit in my day because I'm lazy about that! Apples have been a godsend for me. You may want to check the link for Spark People. You fill in a few things about yourself, choose if you want to get any emails at all and choose the calorie range you are comfortable in. They calculate based upon calories consumed how long it should take you to reach goal and you can track everything on your profile online. Not kidding this is an excellent site which I have been using to help me stay on track and it is absolutely free with NO GIMMICKS. If you want moral support there is a group of us here - all doing different diets - on the weekly support thread. Each of us are at different goals and mainly log in to keep our focus, encourage each other along the way and just a great group of folk all looking for a healthier lifestyle. We don't judge nor criticize. Our thread is to pull each other along. I am so glad to see your post and hope we can help you reach your goal and stay the course! Cheers, McPeg Here is a link that might be useful: Spark People

I guess this one is right up my alley. I'm mom of 4 sons though only one is still on the "payroll" though he's now off at college. Anyway there were a lot of years cooking for 6 and 5 of them were VERY hungry! I still use a plan though it's much looser and of course easier! Living 10 miles from a store and having a crowd to feed, I found doing a weekly menu saved me from living at the grocery store! I have a day that I go to the store and that day, I'll take stock of any items from the week before that I didn't use or any meals from the previous week that I never got around to cooking. Then I sit down with one or two cookbooks and start in. I jot down about 4 breakfasts and a few lunches if I think that people will be around (summer etc) but don't put a huge amount of thought into these two. I can always whip up a good breakfast with whats on hand for the most part. With kids around, plan on some nutritious snacks. For dinner, I plan out however many meals we'll need for the week. I usually figure that I'll have one meal where we either do leftovers or I defrost something from the freezer. We also usually eat out about once a week. So that leaves me with selecting 5 true menus. I do it all from veggies, salads, starch, bread and main dish. Be sure to make a note of the page in the cookbook for any new recipes. Look at your calendar for the week and be sure you have enough no brainers for the busy days. Cook extra chicken/meat and use it for a second meal turned into sandwiches, soup, or a casserole. Shopping for a week is easy and feasible. Do your meals that require the freshest produce at the beginning of your week and save the meatless/soup/pizza/sandwich meals for later in the week. Precook or freeze any meats that you'll be having at the end of the seven days. I'd usually need to pick up more milk midweek as my guys guzzled more than a gallon a day. I keep the menu paper on my island, and I feel free to substitute and change the meal or parts of the meal as needed swapping days etc. Remember nothing is written in stone!!! I think part of your "negative" slant on the menu planning may be that you don't want to be pinned down. Roll with the flow, change meals around.... it's only a guideline not military orders that you must follow to a T!!! Grace

I used to do this in the dark ages (1980s and 1990s) by hand. I made an open grid and photocopied the blank sheet and wrote in the menus, which were then put on the refrigerator door. Basically, we had a list of "acceptable" breakfast choices, and they could choose based on preference or available time. Lunches were either sandwiches (at home or sack lunch to school), or leftovers from dinner. (No hot lunches at my house, unless they were heated up leftovers or soup was included.) Dinners were always one protein, two vegetables or veg and fruit and occasionally a grain, usually brown or wild rice. They had whole wheat bread for sandwiches and oatmeal or whole grain cereal for breakfast if they were eating fast. Salads at least three times per week, no funky veg like parsnips or turnips. We had meat of some sort 5 days out of seven ( no one in our family eats fish or seafood). It was easy to plug in the veg and fruit. Snacks-- there was a list of acceptable snacks on the schedule as well, and we kept celery sticks, carrots, raisins, mozzarella sticks and cookies on hand for that. On Friday nights we almost always ordered pizza and the entire neighborhood of kids came over to share it. The older kids brought out all our skateboard ramps from the garage and set them up on the driveway and they all ate and skateboarded outside until it was dark. Sundays after church we usually went out to dinner (lunch) and had potluck Sunday night. We did this for years and years. I always felt more in control of the process when I planned meals in advance. Whenever anybody asked what was for dinner the answer was always "check the schedule."

We grow what we like to eat, first and foremost, so that we are motivated to eat it later on regardless of how it is preserved. My first preference always is to eat fresh, in season, but the reality is that if you only eat fresh, in-season food, then you may find yourself eating so much food during its relatively brief fresh season (like asparagus, for example) that you get sick of it, but then later on you find yourself craving it out of season. I love aspragus but even I don't want to eat it every day during the couple of months it is producing,so we eat it fresh several days a week and freeze the rest. I try to freeze in the manner that is most productive for cooking later on---for example, cutting the produce into bite sized pieces before freezing it and freezing it in batches that are the right size for a meal. That makes cooking it quick and easy in the off-season. With raw materials that can go into meals, like chopped frozen onions, I freeze in 1/2 or 1 cup amounts that can be used with the recipes from which I prepare meals. Like Dorothy, our garden is a food-preserver's garden, which is quite different from a fresh-eating only garden, because you do get vast amounts (as planned) of produce in-season and you have to deal with it in a timely manner. Every day begins with harvesting in the early morning hours and I plan that day's meals around what we have, setting aside that amount of produce for fresh eating. The rest gets preseved via canning, freezing, dehydrating or fermenting, or is root cellared (potatoes, onions, etc.). When I plant cabbage, for example, in late winter, I know we are not going to want to eat cabbage daily for a couple of months, so I am careful not to plant too much. The excess harvest always becomes sauerkraut or sometimes freezer slaw or it gets used in a chow chow or relish recipe. This year I fermented four batches, three of cabbage sauerkraut, and the fourth a hot sauerkraut that included hot peppers and carrots. All are through fermenting and canned now and that's a good thing because it is hard to keep our west-facing kitchen cool enough for proper fermentation in July and August. We do use our preserved food, but that is a very deliberate choice. I wouldn't spend all the time growing and preserving it if we weren't going to use it. I value the time and money invested in the garden too much to waste the harvest. You do have to make a very deliberate decision to plan meals around the food you grow and to take the time to cook them. It is a lot more work to prepare home-cooked meals from scratch versus using convenience foods (like Hamburger Helper or whatever) and fast food, but I try to make the bulk of our meals healthy ones from our garden. First of all, they taste better. Secondly, we know how this food was raised. Third, huge amounts of fossil fuels weren't used to transport the food from our garden to our house and that matters to me. I don't know how long we as a world can keep transporting food an average of 1500 miles from the place where it is grown to the grocery stores where it is sold. To me, growing and eating our own produce is part of our effort to live a more sustainable lifestyle that is not based on burning excessive fossil fuels. There are gazillions of ways to use fresh food. You can, for example, make sorbet out of almost anything you raise in terms of fruit, or you can make chips---I like kale chips and okra chips. Frozen food can be used in many ways. It is all about how you choose to use your time. I have tons of vegetable cookbooks with creative ways for using produce, so that we don't get stuck in a rut and eat the same old produce cooked the same old way every time. Some of my favorite veggie cookbooks are very old ones from Southern Living magazine, published decades ago when cooking meals from scratch was still considered an important art, not a waste of time. My time goes into the garden, harvesting the produce, cooking with it, and preserving it. That is the choice I make. I get somewhat amused at gardeners (and I bet we all know people like this) who grow all kinds of food, and take photos of their harvest and post those photos almost daily, but who rarely eat the food they grow. I feel like the 'social media generation' (who often are quite a bit younger than I am) love gardening for a different reason than I do---some of them seem to love it for the joy of growing the food and of photographing it and putting it on their FB pages, but they may not yet have mastered actually using very much of it. I have high hopes that their love of growing it eventually will lead to them actually using it for more than photos. Some young adults who grew up on convenience food and fast food have to make a very concerted effort to learn how to prepare and use the produce they raise because, perhaps, they didn't grow up in a home where meals regularly were prepared from scratch. I feel very lucky because my dad always grew produce and cooked from scratch (and he canned as well), while my mom abhorred the work involved in doing that, so when she cooked, it was often using convenience foods. This led to an amusing conversation with my brother in the early 2000s when he remarked that our mom didn't make very special meals on weekends, but that the weekend meals were great. I looked at him, wondering what planet he was from, and informed him that was because our dad did the bulk of the weekend cooking. I couldn't believe my brother grew up in the same household and never made the connection between the weekday vs. weekend meals and who was doing the cooking. It make me laugh out loud and ask him if he wasn't paying attention to who was in the kitchen in our childhood! He seemed completely baffled as our other siblings and I assure him that it was indeed Dad who was largely producing those great weekend meals. As an adult, I made a deliberate choice to pursue gardening, cooking and canning like my dad did and to largely avoid convenience food cooking. Have grown up eating both kinds of meals, I knew what I preferred and that was what I wanted for our family too. When I am in the garden, as much as I enjoy being out there, I never lose sight of the fact that my garden is a working garden. I'm not out there to play around, take photos, visit with friends, conduct garden tours, or to sit in a nice chair, sipping a glass of iced tea, and chilling and relaxing. That is not my reality. Particularly, I am out in the garden to work hard quickly (to both beat the heat and avoid the snakes), bring in the harvest and spend the rest of the day using it and preserving it. It is a job, truly, and not a hobby or a past-time, but it is a job I love and a job I enjoy doing overall, though there are occasional days that I hate it because I find myself working from sunrise until well after dark and that gets tiring. So, yes, we use what we grow, but it is because we choose to do that, and because we have developed the self-discipline to use what we grow and to not waste it. If we aren't using it, I yank it out and replace it with something we will use. Right now, with all our tomato preservation needs met/exceeded for this year, I am yanking out tomato plants right and left and replacing them with new crops for fall. It is a somewhat thankless task to be doing this on a hot July day, but I do it because I want to have a great harvest in late summer, autumn and winter. It also leaves some of my tomato-growing friends (who don't preserve their harvest) appalled that I remove plants still capable of producing, but I always keep enough tomato plants for fresh eating, and anything beyond that is a waste of space because I'm through preserving tomatoes for this year. Because we live in a rural area where families are very tied to the land and many gardens are multi-generational, where the grandparents, parents and grandkids (and sometimes great-grandparents and great-grandkids) all eat from the garden and help preserve the food from it, I had lots of encouragement and support from some of those multigeneration garden families in our neighborhood when I first started growing/preserving our food here. Mostly, though, they just served as an inspiration for me---I wanted to grow enough food to put up huge harvests like they did. As time went on and our garden produced all we could use and preserve, I noticed that these same multigenerational family gardens all hit the same point that mine did---the production level reached a point where nobody wanted to can another tomato. It became amusing as one friend or another would call and ask if we wanted or needed any more tomatoes (or okra or whatever) because they were through with their canning for the year and their plants still were producing. Many of them, like me, were growing 100-200 tomato plants in spring to meet their fresh eating and preservation needs. It made me realize we all were just alike---growing more than we can eat even though we preserve a great deal of it. To live this sort of edible gardening lifestyle is a deliberate choice. If you like gardening, but don't like using or preserving the produce, then why not just switch over to more ornamental gardening and less edible gardening? Our garden is multipurpose, providing not only fresh and preserved fruits, veggies and herbs, but also flowers for cut flower bouquets and pumpkins, gourds, amaranth and other ornamental decorative items for fall porch displays or table displays. If I don't fill up a lot of our growing space with flowers and only use it all for edibles, I'd never sleep because I'd be too busy preserving food. There's always room to grow some ornamental/decorative items or to grow compost crops to feed the compost pile or to grow cover crops to hold the soil When you are preserving food, why not use it later on? It is so wasteful to grow it and preserve it but then not to use it. I am happy every single time that we walk through a grocery store and aren't buying food that I have a home---whether that food is fresh and sitting on the kitchen counter or in the fridge, or if it is frozen, dehydrated, fermented, canned, etc. I love breezing through the produce section and only buying, let's say, lettuce, bananas, apples and grapes in summer or cranberries in fall or whatever. I love skipping the frozen food section (except to buy waffles and ice cream) because our own home-grown food fills the freezer. There's a part of me that gets very tired of the summer workload, but not tired enough to stop doing it. Every time there is news of yet another food-induced illness involving salonella, e. coli, etc. on produce, I am grateful we raise our own and don't have to risk bringing home some disease on grocery-store produce. I don't even like buying lettuce in summer, but Tim must have his salad, so we buy it and then we just have to hope we aren't buying contaminated produce. I'm happier fall through spring when we have our own lettuce and salad greens. Many people go to the grocery store and buy food and plan their meals around that purchased food and there's nothing wrong with that, but we are exactly the opposite when we go to the store. We already have planned our meals based around the food we have, whether fresh or preserved, and we just buy whatever we might need to make those meals complete. That's our preference, always. When we eat something like a purchased pizza, I still always joke with my family that "I grew this on the pizza tree out back" and we laugh. I do can pizza sauce and we do make homemade pizzas too, but there is room in everyone's life for a little fast food or convenience food as well. Dawn