How to Meal Plan: The Ultimate Guide

We have one message for you: you can be a meal planner. It doesn't have to be ridiculously complicated and time consuming. You don't have to drink kale smoothies, eat kale salads, snack on kale chips, and "splurge" on chocolate cake with hidden kale.

Instead, you can make a meal plan that includes the recipes and store bought foods you like to eat, and you can still make realistic improvements to your diet (if you want to). That's what this meal planning guide is for - we'll show you how to make a meal plan so you can reach your goals without losing your mind in the process.

If you know how to meal plan already, we still hope you'll find some useful tips to make meal planning an even better experience.

You probably need to do a little pantry clean up. Go through your fridge and cupboards and throw out everything that's long expired. Set yourself up with some basic ingredients. You can find pantry lists for just about any diet, including Paleo, clean eating, etc.

You guys sound well prepared. Next step!

Before you learn how to meal plan, you need to learn how to cook. This means you've got a little work cut out for you - it's time to master some simple meals.

Luckily, learning to cook really isn't that difficult and you can absolutely take a "learn by doing" approach here. Think of some meals you would like to eat on a regular basis and find recipes for them that don't have too many ingredients, use too many different techniques, or require too much multitasking.

Keep track of your successes and failures, but you'll almost certainly have more successes (or near successes) than outright failures, and soon you'll build the kind of intuition you need to salvage the meal when something goes wrong.

Excellent. You probably already have the cooking skills you need.

Crossing something off a physical list feels good, doesn't it? I can certainly relate to anyone who doesn't want to abandon pen and paper meal planning. It's kind of like not wanting to get an eReader because you'll miss the feel of paper under your fingertips and that wonderful "book smell."

If this describes you, there are tons of free meal planning printables out there. Some of these templates are more cute than functional, but they make great fridge décor and let everyone know what's for dinner. Others let you plan your meals for the week and make your shopping list on the other side of the page. You can also find templates that only have a spot for dinner in case you don't feel the need to plan your breakfast and lunch on paper.

Just google "free meal planning template" or "free meal planning printable" to find a huge variety. You'll know better than me what meets your needs.

You can also create a menu board with a chalk board or dry erase board. They are even available to purchase inexpensively on Amazon if you don't have time to make one yourself.

Even though meal planning by hand can be more enjoyable, it can also be more difficult.

Unless you have a physical recipe collection that you can use while you meal plan, you might end up with a kind of writer's block. Even if you have a recipe collection, it will take time to flip through all those pages (or sort through all those recipe cards), when a good digital option would make your recipe collection searchable by just pressing enter.

Plus, meal planning online makes it easier to find new recipes, for example to use up ingredients you already know you'll have leftover. Making a soup that needs half a container of broth and a few celery stalks? Find a casserole recipe with chicken broth and celery for later that week.

Some meal planning apps even double as a food tracker to help you can count calories, fat, protein, etc.

If you want to upgrade from pen and paper, some people use Excel for meal planning. This site, for example, offers numerous meal planning templates for Excel. If you're looking for something visually attractive and fun to use, though, these probably aren't what you want.

Instead, we recommend a good meal planning app. In general, meal planning apps have the primary advantage that you can easily organize a large quantity of recipes, and you can take these recipes anywhere.

Some apps (including spoonacular, hint hint!) also make it possible to generate a shopping list automatically and get nutritional information without doing any of the math yourself. Huge time savers.

Of course, not every meal planning app is user friendly, and some even require you to pay to unlock all the features. We recommend finding a free meal planner you like, so if you do take a break from meal planning, you won't be charged for the months you aren't using it.

As someone trying to save money, your meal plan should focus on ingredients that are in season or on sale. Look at grocery store flyers while you meal plan, or shop the week before so you can make your plan with a freezer full of sale items to put to use. Plan meals with cheap protein sources, such as meat you bought on sale, canned fish, beans, lentils, etc.

As someone trying to lose weight or eat healthier, you should take the common advice to "shop the perimeter" - that is, stick to the produce section, fresh meats and fish, and dairy aisle as much as possible. When choosing convenience foods, opt for less processed options like unsweetened frozen fruit, plain or seasoned frozen vegetables, even minimally processed frozen potatoes, but avoid frozen meals, frozen vegetables with sauces, etc.

As someone with a busy schedule, it is important to anticipate when you're going to be low on time and plan for it.

If you have a busy week coming up, you might use the weekend to prepare a number of dishes that you can enjoy throughout the week, such as a huge batch of overnight oats, containers of chopped veggies, nuts, and lean cooked protein for compiling salads, rice for making quick stir fries, and so on. If you own a slow cooker, that might be the route you take instead.

Always read the nutrition facts label and ingredient lists to avoid products high in sugar and sodium or products that have long, unreadable ingredient lists. Our product search can help you narrow down your search before you head to the store.

If you're not too concerned about cost you can also plan on incorporating some time saving but less budget friendly items, such as pre-cut fruit and vegetables, salad kits, etc. You might also splurge on healthy protein bars or frozen veggie burgers. Convenience doesn't have to be unhealthy (though it might cost you).

The following steps in our meal planning guide contain screenshots from spoonacular's free meal planner.

Step 1

Get your schedule for the week and open your meal planner. If you have plans to eat out at any point, put that on your meal planner already.

Step 2

Now it's time to fill in the blank spots. If you don't typically cook breakfast on weekdays, you can already put your usual Greek yogurt and fruit, favorite green smoothie recipe, whatever. Otherwise put down your French toast or bacon and eggs (and please invite us over.)

Step 3

For lunch and dinner, it's important to figure out when you have time to cook and when you need something fast. As we already said, if you always pack a lunch for the office or if weeknights are always busy with the kids, you should create recipe collections called "Work Lunch" and "Weeknight Dinner." We suggest using these collections as placeholders, putting them in the right spots on the meal planner before you figure out exactly which meals you want to make. Actually, "Weeknight Dinner" is likely not specific enough - you will probably want to create several collections, such as "Vegetarian Dinner", "Egg Dishes", or "Italian Dinners."

Step 4

Once you come up with a basic format for the average week you only have to plug in suitable recipes from your collections. For example, your format might be something like vegetarian dinner on Monday, egg dishes on Tuesday, Italian on Wednesday, weeknight chicken recipe on Thursday, fish on Friday. Now when you start planning a new week, you just have to pick one of your vegetarian recipes, like your favorite quinoa cakes, and move on to replacing your next placeholder. Note: try to make your recipe collections diverse enough that you don't get tired of eating any one meal; it also helps if you choose meals that can be easily modified so they don't feel repetitive. You can make endless variations on frittatas and simple pasta dishes by using different proteins, vegetables, and seasonings, for example.

Step 5

Make a shopping list and buy what you need for the week. Stick to your plan the best you can, but don't stress out about moving dishes around as needed.

Step 6

Once you've mastered getting the week's 28 meals (!) planned, you can start thinking ahead and planning meals that repeat ingredients so there's no stress about using up leftovers. Let's say you're planning a lasagna with ricotta cheese for Sunday dinner, but you know you always have a third of the container left. You can already plan to make scrambled eggs with ricotta for dinner the next week. Having caprese salad with fresh basil? Plan on a sandwich with homemade basil pesto for the next day. You might even try doing themed weeks; it'll be easy to use up that shredded cheese, sour cream, and cilantro if you plan a week of Mexican dishes.

Step 7

After you've planned and eaten your way through your first week, reflect on how it went. Did some of your supposedly 30-minute weeknight dinners take way longer to prepare? Did you end up tossing out a bunch of wilted greens? Did you spend way more at the grocery store than you intended to? If you're following a special diet, did you eat the right amount of calories, carbs, protein, fat, etc.? Take note of what worked and what didn't and try again. Soon you'll have a system that works for you.