The lack of organisation in my life drives me nuts and every time I spend hours searching for something I vow that I will be more organised in future. However, no matter how much I want things to be organised and no matter how much energy I put in to getting things more organised, my life is still in chaos and the more I try to organise things, the more chaotic I seem to make it!

However, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes I decided that I really needed to organise my diet much better than I had up until then. I decided that all processed and convenience foods would be eliminated from my diet and I would live on natural foods as much as possible.

I also had a family to look after which included two adult males and I was responsible for cooking the evening meal. I did not have time or the will to cook separate meals for them and separate meals for me so what was I going to do?

I explained to the men that the food I had to eat had to be what a normal person on a healthy diet would eat and fortunately, probably due to media influences around the time, they decided that it would be a good idea if they improved their diet too.

Now all I had to do was to get organised.

This is how I did it:

1. I found some healthy recipes to cook for our evening meal. There are lots of recipe books and websites full of healthy recipes available these days so it was not that difficult to find some easy to cook family recipes.
2. I made myself a weekly meal planner and jotted down the meals I planned to eat that week.
3. I bought myself a ring binder and put those recipes in plastic pockets inside of the binder.
4. I then made my shopping list by jotting down the ingredients I needed from each of the recipe pages.

It was easy and I was on my way to a much healthier way of eating.

I have kept this system up for almost three years and I could not live without it now. The best thing about it is that it frees up my time for more interesting things. I no longer have to spend hours thinking of things we can eat and no longer just pick up anything in the supermarket. Grocery shopping is now much quicker too.

Over the years I have added lots of new recipes to my recipe file and have a four week menu plan so we never have the same evening meal more than once a month. This makes sure our diet is varied and also helps us not to miss out on our favourite dishes. The ring binder is especially flexible as recipes can be added, taken out and rearranged as necessary.

Below are some Weekly Meal Planners I have created for you to use to set up your weekly menus. Click on the picture of the meal planner you would like. The meal planner will open as a PDF document for you to print. Alternatively, right click on the download link and save to your hard drive.

I hope these help you to organise your diet with very little hassle.

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