Being an eTools subscriber has its ups and downs. I can barely remember to write everything in my tracker, much less going upstairs to the computer and logging it in to the eTools one! But I have kept my eTools subscription because I love the fact that I can look in my freezer/fridge and see what I have and seach WW recipes based on the current contents of my fridge.
However, because I shop on impulse (grocery shopping consists of walking the aisles and grabbing whatever looks interesting), I sometimes have a harder time finding something that I want to make without another trip to the grocery store.
Enter eTools
While "playing around" with it Friday morning, I switched back to the old Points Tracker (away from the Plan Manager Beta) and it was as if a light came on in my head.
For the next 2 hours, I planned every morsel that I was going to eat until this Friday. I took in to account that I have a cookie swap to attend on Wednesday and that I needed to plan meals that my children and husband would also eat (unless I wanted to cook multiple entrees each night). The result was a week with lots of healthy meals and quite a bit of food for my 22 points per day....yet I didn't dip in to my Weekly Points Allowance at all!
But here's the best part! After planning the menus, I hit a single button and out popped a complete shopping list for everything that I was scheduled to eat. There was the minor annoyance of having to go through the list and cross off the "pantry staples" that most people don't need to buy each week (salt, pepper, canned tomatoes, etc). However when I was done crossing off, I added it to the list of "kid food" that I needed to buy this week and went grocery shopping.
I think that it was one of the least expensive "full shops" (as opposed to just running in for milk & bananas) in years.
It's been 3 days and I can't tell you how much easier it is making everything. Now we'll have to see what the scale says this week!
