The Optimal Healthy Meal Planning Guide is here to make your life a whole lot easier.
Do these dinnertime routines sound familiar?
- Staring at the items in your pantry and fridge, waiting for some divine inspiration to let you know what’s for dinner tonight.
- Going to the supermarket and hoping all ingredients for today’s nourishing meal will magically fall into your trolley.
- Making the same thing over and over again.
- Getting take out because you’re too tired to figure out what to cook, let alone cook the actual meal.
Organising healthy family meals can be such a challenging task. And not one many of us like, me included. We’re already super busy, keeping many balls in the air, so how on earth can we also fit meal planning in our schedule?
Get organised
Well, here’s the deal. If we don’t organise our meals and groceries, we’ll be behind the eight ball all week. We make less healthy choices, choose convenience over quality, and our grocery expenses will be higher. We also have to go grocery shopping more often, which is very time-consuming. And don’t forget having to deal with the stress-provoking question from your family: “What’s for dinner?”.
Wouldn’t it be great if we can get ourselves and our families organised for a healthy week, and save time and money while doing it?
But where do you to start?
Meal planning! It will take you a little bit of extra time at first to get organised. But once you’ve got the hang of it, meal planning will save you so much time in the long run. I promise.
Healthy Meal Planning Guide
To help you on your way, I’ve written this step-by-step healthy meal planning guide. It’ll get you from chaos to control. From reactive to proactive. Creating more breathing space in your busy life.
Let’s do some healthy meal planning.
1. Get a Meal Planning Document
First, you need to get yourself a meal planner, so you can start planning your week. There are many options. Like using a simple notepad or whiteboard, and writing the days of the week and different meals on there. Or just use the weekly meal planner I’ve made especially for you to make things easy. You can find it here.
2. Pick a day of the week for your meal planning
Which day do you go grocery shopping? I strongly advise you to go just once a week, because it makes your grocery shopping time more efficient and cost-effective. Ordering online is an option that will save you time and money too. Many supermarkets offer that option these days.
Your meal planner will start on the day, or on the day after you’ve done your grocery shopping.
For example: if you do your grocery shopping on Monday, have your meal planning finished on Sunday and start your meal planner on Monday or Tuesday.
Stick to these same days for consistency. We’re creatures of habit, and more likely to stick to good habits if they’re routine.
3. Pick meals
Next up, we’re going to create a master list of meals. On a separate sheet of paper, write down 5 meals of each; breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner. Base your meals on the following questions:
- What’s leftover in the fridge and pantry? Which meals would you be able to prepare with that? This website is great if you don’t know what to cook with your leftover items. Just use the search field to fill out your ingredient and relevant recipes will come up. When you start with taking inventory, you reduce food waste and save money on having to buy new food.
- Which healthy meals are easy for you to prepare and do you enjoy? Choose meals that don’t require any brainpower. What would you be able to cook in your sleep?
- We’ll need some dinners that are easy to freeze. Meals like soups, stews, curries, and stir-fries. Which ones do you like?
- Go through cookbooks, which recipes do you like? Limit new recipes that you’ve never cooked before, to just once a week. You want to keep things simple and not overdo it.
- If you don’t have a cookbook, go to a recipe site like this. Which recipes are appealing to you?
The focus with meal planning is always on dinner, but don’t forget you need to eat healthy during the day too.
Breakfast – Here is some inspiration for healthy breakfasts from my previous blogs:
Lunch – Healthy lunch examples: salad, sandwich, wrap, omelet, dinner leftovers.
Snacks – Healthy snack ideas: nuts, fruits, chopped up carrots and celery sticks with some hummus, homemade granola bars, rice crackers, healthy cookies.
4. Fill out your meal planner
Now, you should have 5 different meals for each group. Well done!
1. What’s happening this week?
Before we can start filling out these meals onto the meal planner, you’ll need to figure out what your week is going to look like. Are there any days that you’re not going to be home? Nights that you’re going out for dinner? Cross out the meals on your planner that you won’t be having at home.
2. Freezer meals aka intentional leftovers
Next, are there any nights that you’ll be home late after kid’s sports classes and have limited time to make dinner? Days that you’re likely to work overtime? Write “freezer meal” on that day, because you definitely don’t want to be cooking that night, but still eat something healthy.
3. Fill it out
Fill out all the rest of the meals on your planner. If you’re going to be home all week, you’ll have 5 meals of each to write on your planner.
Save more complicated meals for days on which you really have time to cook and try out new recipes.
4. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Now I can hear you think: “but there’s 7 days in a week”.
Here’s the trick: you’re going to repeat to keep things simple. Besides planning, repeating is going to be your new best friend.
- So with your breakfast, lunch, and snacks; repeat 2 meals of each on 2 other days in your week.
- You’ve already got 6 dinners filled out as you’ve included a freezer meal on your planner. You only have to repeat one of your dinners this week. (If this is your first week meal planning and you don’t have a freezer meal yet, repeat 2 dinners this week and make sure to prepare an extra batch so you’ve got your freezer meal for next week sorted).
- With the meals that you’re repeating, make enough for 2 days in 1 go on the first day you’re having it. That saves you having to cook on the second day.
Yes, that’s right, you just gave yourself 2 nights off cooking. And you’re still eating something healthy. Thank goodness for repeating!
When you find yourself having lots of leftovers, and you don’t need them for lunch the next day; include a leftover night in your meal plan too. Or freeze to have at a later time.
Get the gear
If you haven’t already, invest in some good containers (preferably glass to limit your exposure to BPA) to keep your repeat meals and freezer meals in. Make sure to label the containers, so you always know what’s in them and they don’t get lost in the back or bottom of the fridge or freezer. I use masking tape to label the containers, it’s cheap and it’s easy to pull off once you’ve used the meal.
💡Freezer meals: for all meals on your meal plan that are easy to freeze (soups, stews, curries, and stir-fries), make sure to do some bulk cooking. Double, triple, quadruple the recipe – depending on the size of your cooking equipment and freezer – so you have your freezer meals sorted for the following weeks.
🌱 If you know me a little bit, I’m all about being kind to the planet and our environment. And unfortunately, our food system is the number one cause of climate change.
The good news is that you’re making a difference though. Because you’re helping to save our planet with your meal planning. You’re reducing food waste because everything gets eaten as you’ve planned your week. You’re also buying less food because you’re organised and only need to go shopping once a week. Less impulse buys. Less pressure on the environment.
To have an even bigger positive impact on the environment, I suggest adding a fridge clean out dinner to your meal planner. This way zero food gets wasted. A fridge clean out dinner means that you eat whatever’s left in the fridge on the last day of your meal plan. It requires a bit of improvising though, so you’ll need to be comfortable with that. Use the ingredient search on this website for cooking inspiration with your leftover ingredients. 🌱
5. Ingredient list and Shopping list
Almost done.
1. Ingredient List
Go through all the meals on your planner and make a list of all the ingredients that are needed.
Then go through your fridge and pantry to see what you already have. Cross those items off.
2. Shopping List
Now do up a grocery shopping list with all the remaining items on your ingredient list. Also add common items you need all the time, like tea, toilet paper, shampoo, etc.
There you go, that’s your shopping list done for a whole week.
💡 If you really want to get efficient, this is how I do it: I make my shopping list in the order of where products are located in the store. I know -OCD- but it saves so much time grocery shopping because I don’t have to go back and forth through the supermarket. If you don’t want to go to that extreme, making the shopping list per department will also save you time.
And that’s your meal planning done. Okay, so it was a bit of extra work. But don’t you feel organised? Now you only need to go to the grocery store and get cooking.
What else…
- Stick your meal plan on the fridge or anywhere in the kitchen for everyone to see. The whole family will always know what’s for dinner.
- Don’t throw away your used meal planners. Keep them, and look at them afterwards. What worked? What didn’t? Adjust the meal planners in the following weeks accordingly.
- Every time you meal plan, use your master list of meals. Keep adding the meals that work for you and your family to your list.
- And… if you go back to step 3 and write down 20 meals of each, you can set yourself up for 4 weeks in one go. Then rotate your meal planners that work, and you don’t have to do any meal planning for months in a row. Woohoo!
Et voila, you got organised, while saving time, money and the planet. Once you get used to healthy meal planning, it should only take you about 15 – 30 minutes a week. So worthwhile for a happy, healthy family and less stress around mealtime.
Happy Meal Planning!
