Meal Planning and Healthy Eating for Two

It's a daunting task when you take on a new eating plan with the goal of eating healthier and changing your lifestyle. What makes it even more daunting is the other people in the house you have to cook for.... your spouse. He or she may not be seeking the same goals, and that can be particularly problematic. The evening meal I believe should be a melding of the partnership in the home. Just because David works outside the home does not excuse him from not being an active participant in meal planning and or cooking dinner. Yes, my  'job' may be household manager aka home maker, but I do more than just that. Being the home maker I research and plan the meals, then David and I shop together for our weekly groceries. That's what we hope to happen, in reality meetings happen, we go out to eat, I get stressed and order pizza.... then the whole thing just goes to Hell in a hen basket. David usually cooks on the weekends when his work and activity schedule is less chaotic. We both belong to community service organizations that has week night meetings, and are both active in our church, and I have my weekly women's group that I go to. Yet I always strive to have a consistent meal time, and it usually happens. Being 'just us' has it's advantages, we don't have to deal with the chaos of a child's activity schedule of sports and other 'lessons'.

One of the ways we are eating healthy is cutting out the 'box meals'... the prepackaged bombs of sodium and Monsanto chemicals. Yeah they taste good, but the end result for me is pain from aspartame and sucralose, and elevated blood pressure from all the salt. The average amount of sodium per serving of a box meal is about 750-800 mg. Mmmmm salt lick. I'm a human being, not a deer out in the woods. The frozen convenience meals are no better, healthy food 'glazed' with preservatives to keep them fresh... most of them sodium based and very bad for your cardiovascular system. So David and I are eating fresh, fresh from the butcher for our meats and seafood, and fresh from the local farms for our vegetables. This way we keep our local farmer's economy going, which is currently suffering due the drought, and we feel safe in knowing that there are no nasty pesticides and hormones in our food.

I have found Pinterest to be a valuable source for planning meals, and finding healthy recipes. I've even got David on Pinterest and as I find meals to my liking I 'share' them with him by sending a pin.... well, you know how that works. We also have a great program on our iPhone that allows us to share a grocery list called Any List... I have mentioned this one before. The new updates with the iPhone 6  and 7 have meal planning and nutritional information, and as you meal plan, the ingredients go straight to your grocery list. I haven't done the upgrade yet.... I'm still a penny pincher when it comes to that.

Well, it's almost midnight and I've got a weeks worth of meals to plan. Nighty night....

Just us two... why the blog?

Hi there! Just Us Two is a blog about two people who are married and do not have, or will not have, children. It's not that we don't like them, we just don't have them. As marrieds society expects us to have kids, and when we don't, well, we seem to not fit in anywhere. Just Us Two is a place for like minds to read about married life with no kids to gain support, some life hacks, funny anecdotes and a few guilty pleasures (like reading Vogue online while watching Sex and the City). So sit back, bookmark this page and enjoy.