A beginner's guide to meal planning
How to get started with meal planning, and a few sample plans
Intro
When you start looking for ways to save money on food, you’ll see meal planning recommended everywhere, for good reasons! Having a meal plan cuts down on unnecessary purchases and last minute trips to the store. It helps you figure out the best times to pick up and prepare food, which simplifies healthy eating when you’re very busy or tired. Plus, it reduces food waste by ensuring that all the ingredients in your kitchen get used before they expire. That said, it’s not always easy to plan ahead!
Getting started with meal planning can be stressful. It may seem like extra work in your free time. But done right, meal planning saves work, time and money. We all have to figure out what to eat every day, with or without a meal plan. This can be especially difficult on a tight budget since you need to make the most of your groceries. Planning can be the difference between eating well and going hungry. It can also make your week much easier. Instead of trying to cobble together dinner from whatever you can find in the kitchen after a long day, you can just follow your plan.
If this is all the inspiration you need to try meal planning, then go for it. If you’d like a little more advice, keep reading for practical advice. Remember that your first plan is the hardest; planning gets easier as you figure out a process and recipes that work for you. If this process seems overwhelming, the pre-made meal plans at the end of the article may be a good place to start.
Setting yourself up for meal planning success
- Plan around meals you like, fit your lifestyle and your energy levels
When you start meal planning, it’s easy to get very ambitious and decide to completely overhaul your diet by cooking a lot of complicated new recipes. This is a bad idea. If your plan requires you to cook gourmet meals 7 nights a week, it’ll probably cause more problems than it solves. If it involves eating a lot of food you probably won’t like, you probably won’t like following it. After a few weeks of working hard to make miserable food, most people burn out and give up.
Remember that meal planning is supposed to make your life easier. Don’t be afraid to start small, focus on foods you already like to eat, and add plenty of convenient meals to your plan. If you’d like to change up your eating habits, try to be picky and only choose one new recipe you think you’ll enjoy. The best plan is the one that works for you. -
Set goals and assess problems
It’s easier to make a meal plan if you know what you’d like it to do. Are you trying to save money? Cook more at home? Would you like to eat more fruit and veggies, start packing lunches for work, or experiment with different kinds of food? Do you just want to not think about what to eat during the week? If the answer is “all of the above and more”, pick one or two goals to work on at a time.
If you’re having a hard time coming up with goals, try asking if there are problems you’d like a meal plan to address instead. Are there times of the month that you’re running out of food? Do you feel stuck in a rut, eating the same few things over and over? Do you find yourself throwing out a lot of expired food, or relying on convenience store food on days of the week you don’t have time or energy to cook? You can choose one or two issues you’d like to address and use your meal plan to come up with workable solutions.
- Collect meal ideas
Meal planning goes faster if you have a list of meals that you can just plug into a plan. This can look like anything- a notebook, a binder, an app, a bookmarks folder, an online document or spreadsheet, whatever makes sense to you. A good place to start is by making a master list of the food you already eat all the time.“Bologna sandwiches”, “ramen noodles”, “breakfast for supper”, and “take-out” are all perfectly fine meals to include. It’s a good idea to make easy, go-to meals the backbone of your first few meal plans.
If you’re interested in experimenting with new food, you can also collect recipes that you’d like to try. You might have a cookbook or a recipe site that you’d like to work through. If you have an ingredient that needs to be used up, you can do a search for recipes that use it, or go through our recipe section for anything that looks tasty. You could make a meal plan entirely out of these new recipes, but it’s usually better to include just one or two in your meal plan each week. If you like a recipe, you can move it onto your master list and start making it more often. - Involve anyone else who is going to be eating this food
If you’re meal planning for a household, everyone should participate in the planning and cooking process. This can be as simple as contributing breakfast suggestions, or as difficult as sharing in the shopping, cooking, and cleaning responsibilities. Collaborating on meals can be a great way to spend quality time together, pass on skills and traditions, and lighten your workload in the kitchen. People are also more likely to be appreciative of the food they eat if they have input throughout the process.
Four steps to meal planning
1. Choose a time period to plan meals for
Most people start by meal planning for a week at a time. Depending on your situation, you may want to plan around how often you get paid, receive food hampers, or make it out to the grocery store instead. If you do your shopping around store specials, you can wait until your local fliers come out and plan meals around those. Some people work their way up to meal planning for entire months, but as a beginner, it’s a good idea to choose the shortest time period that will work for you.
2. Consider your resources
What’s your food budget for your meal planning period, and what do you have in the kitchen already? If you have ingredients that need to be used up, then you’ll want to plan the first few meals around those. If you’re planning around store specials, then note down what you intend to buy and build your plan around that. If you have no budget, then figure out the best way to use everything you have on hand. To help, try resources like SuperCook, which generates recipe suggestions based only on the ingredients you have in your pantry.
3. Look at your schedule
How much time and energy do you have to spend on food? Are there days that you know you’ll be busy and tired? Are there days that you’ll need to pack food to bring out of the house? Are there days that you’ll be able to tackle groceries or food prep? Things always come up, so be flexible, but you want some sense of when you can cook and when you’ll need food ready to go.
4. Choose meals, and plug them into your plan
Now it's time to pick your meals and get them into your plan! You can work this out on paper or a whiteboard (try sticking it to the fridge!), or use an online document or spreadsheet (this is great for including recipe links). There are plenty of special meal-planning journals, templates, and apps online. You can use these if you like, but they’re not necessary. A simple notebook or online document will work just fine.
Your plan will be highly individual, based on your resources, schedule, and preferences. Deciding how many packages of ramen noodles will get you through the week counts as meal planning, and so does making one giant pot of chilli and eating it for the next four days. If you love cooking, you may want to make something new every night. The pointers below can help guide conventional meal planning, but it's important to personalize this process so your plan works for you.
- Most meal plans start with two or three breakfast and lunch options that are easy to throw together. If you get sick of “overnight oats or cereal” and “sandwich or cup o’ soup with fruit” then by all means, change this up, but having a few repeat meals per week will make things easier.
- Suppers are usually chosen next, usually based on when you’re able to cook. If you have free time on Monday, but Tuesday looks busy, you can plan to cook on Monday and eat leftovers on Tuesday. You also want to use common ingredients where possible; if you’re buying a family pack of ground beef, you can plan for tacos one night and beef stroganoff another. Batch cooking is a great help here!
- Add snacks and extras. Some people like to have specific snacks planned for every day, while others like to just add some options to the grocery list to eat as wanted. If you have a little extra income, it’s also a good idea to pick up a back-up meal that’s fast to make and won’t spoil such as canned soup, instant noodles, or a frozen pizza. You won’t necessarily eat this right away, but it can stay in the house, ready for the day a recipe doesn’t turn out or your plans get disrupted.
- As you’re writing down your meals, start listing the ingredients you’ll need to make them. Take your list to the kitchen and cross off everything you already have. This will create your shopping list (if you're able to shop).
- Once you have a list, go over your plan one last time to be sure that it makes sense. Note down the days you’re planning to shop, prep, and cook your food. It’s easy to forget prep tasks like defrosting meat or soaking dried beans the night before cooking something, so it helps to leave yourself reminders to do that. If you’re using recipes, put them somewhere where they’ll be easy to find (like an online document or bookmarks folder), so you don’t need to go hunting for them during the week.
Building a plan and following a plan are two different skills. Don’t worry if there are a few missteps in your first few plans; this is a learning process, and you’ll tweak things to work for you as you go. It’s a good idea to save a copy of your plans and ingredient lists somewhere. Once you have some good meal plans sorted out, you can reuse the same plan, and adapt it as your needs, budget and interests change.
Sample meal plans and generators
The sample meal plans and generators below offer great examples. You can follow them directly, or use them as a model to design your own.
- Winnipeg Regional Health Authority: 4 Weeks of Healthy Menus
This resource includes an entire month of weekly meal plans, with grocery lists and recipes included. They are relatively low-budget and take into account using leftovers so that you don't have to cook every night. The food might not be to your taste, but it's a really good example of what a meal plan can look like! This plan is calibrated for one single adult woman, so if you intend to follow it, you might have to adjust the portion sizes to meet your household's needs. - Dieticians of Canada: Cookspiration Menu Planner
This site generates a weekly meal plan based on goals that you select (budget-friendly, kid-approved, vegetarian and so on), with links to recipes included. Because the plan is auto-generated, it usually recommends cooking entirely different recipes for breakfast, lunch, and supper every day, which is unrealistic for most people. But you can edit the plan to make it more workable for you, and the site is a good starting point if you'd like a meal-planning template and new recipes to try. - Diabetes Canada: 7- Day Meal Plans:
These are weekly meal plans meant for people managing diabetes, though they can be followed by anyone. The site offers a variety of meal plans to suit different tastes and needs, for example, Mediterranian, South Asian, and dairy-free. The plans are portioned to provide a relatively low amount of calories throughout the day, so users are advised to adjust the portion sizes and snacks to meet their needs. - Heart and Stroke Foundation Canda: Meal Planning Toolkit
If you don't have a problem putting breakfast and lunch together but struggle with dinner, this resource can help. It includes 3 weeks of dinners, along with recipes and shopping lists. The recipes are very healthy but can be a little pricey; don't be afraid to modify them as needed, or use this resource more as inspiration than an exact guide!