How to Meal Plan Step by Step

Here’s everything you need to know about meal planning: how to create a meal plan and make it work for your entire family, even with a busy schedule!

Making a meal plan is the BEST way to keep your family eating real food on a budget. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve learned my favorite method of meal planning, and it saves me time and money!

Whether you plan meals for an entire month or plan one week at a time, this step-by-step method breaks meal planning down into simple tasks.

If you’ve ever thought, “I want to start meal planning…, but I don’t know how to meal plan”, this is a great place to start!

WHAT IS MEAL PLANNING?

So, what is meal planning, exactly? Planning what meals you’ll make for a specific period of time.

This could be as simple as figuring out what’s for dinner tonight – if you’ve done that, you’ve started meal planning!

Or it could be as complicated as planning what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for the next month.

If you’re brand new to meal planning, I recommend choosing a shorter time frame and planning dinners. As you get used to making menu plans, you can add in breakfasts or lunches or increase the number of days you’re planning for.

WHY MEAL PLAN?

There are several reasons to start meal planning.

• Less stress. Knowing what’s for dinner ahead of time helps with the mental load of keeping the household running.
• Save time. Planning ahead means you don’t have to scramble at dinner time.
• Save money. Along with avoiding expensive last-minute takeout, you can also plan meals with cheaper ingredients and buy in bulk for a better price per ounce of ingredients you use often.
• Eat better. Meal planning helps you make food that aligns with your food priorities and weight loss goals.
• Avoid wasting food. By planning ahead, you’ll be able to use the ingredients you buy and eat up leftovers to avoid food waste.
• And you’ll know the answer when someone asks, “What’s for dinner?”

MEAL PLANNING STEP-BY-STEP

Ready to learn how to meal plan? Let’s get started!

1. START YOUR MEAL PLAN BY CREATING CONSISTENCIES

Pull out your meal planning calendar (or a piece of paper) and with a pencil, write down any dinners that are the same every week.

For example, we LOVE to make our own pizza, so we do that every Friday night.

It relieves stress to plan for one less day each week and saves money because we can buy ingredients in bulk. Plus, as a family, we all look forward to that night every week!

2. PLAN YOUR MENU AROUND WEEKLY ACTIVITIES

Dinner often gets tossed aside as a second thought or no thought at all when we have a bunch of things on the calendar. The question is, if we know we have these commitments, then why can’t we plan dinner around them? I want you to:

• Write down your consistent obligations on your meal plan calendar and alongside it write in “Leftover Night” or “Quick and Easy”.
• Make a list of your favorite quick and easy meals to refer to when meal planning for busy nights…Here are some of our favorites.
• Then, let’s say you have baseball on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Every Tuesday for six weeks, pick a different quick and easy family favorite from your list and save leftovers for Thursday. (My slow cooker is my best friend for these kinds of nights!) Repeat your six-week rotation for the entire baseball season.

Look, your meal plan is already filling up!

3. WHAT ARE YOUR FOOD GOALS FOR YOUR WEEKLY EATING PLAN?

Are you working on feeding your family more real food? Make your healthy eating goals a reality by including them in your weekly eating plan.

• Planning a soup and salad night would increase your vegetables and help you consume more bone broth.
• On one of the days you are home, plan a meal prep day to make foods like bread and snacks, eliminating processed foods from your pantry.
• You can align your eating goals with your grocery budget goals too: Stretching your meat to cover multiple meals or even going meatless one night a week will both make big strides toward saving money. If you need some ideas to fill out your meal plan, check out these 25+ Cheap Healthy Meals (for under $10).
• Even small things like making your own dressings and sauces add up in the long run. Plus, you’ll be feeding your family better food!

4. MAKE A MEAL PLAN TEMPLATE WITH CATEGORIES

You may feel a little overwhelmed at this point, thinking you’re going to have to come up with a ton of recipes for the days that are left.

But we’re not going to do that. Instead, we’re going to pick a few broad categories of meals we like to eat and create a meal plan template that’s easy to fill in. Think of different categories of foods your family enjoys:

• Sandwiches
• Pasta
• Baked dishes
• Grilled protein
• Soup/salad
• Potatoes
• New recipes
• Casseroles
• Slow cooker
• Comfort food
• Italian
• Mexican

You should choose categories that best fit your current season of life. If it’s cold outside, you might want more comfort foods or baked casseroles.

If it’s summer, you might be grilling more often and eating cold meals like sandwiches and salads.

If your family really enjoys a particular cuisine like Italian or Mexican food, make that one of your weekly meal plan categories.

5. CHOOSE MEALS BASED ON WHAT YOU HAVE

Go through the freezer, refrigerator, and pantry and notice what you already have.

• Do you have lots of ground beef? Perhaps some Burgers or Italian Meatballs should be on your menu this week.
• Have a lot of rice, but no pasta? Aim for Asian dishes since they’re more likely to be served with rice.
• With the ingredients you already have in your house, write down recipe ideas next to each category from the last step.

Again, the meals you choose don’t have to be extravagant recipes – we’re basically brainstorming for a “grand master recipe list” that you can go to when you meal plan again!

As you thumb through magazines, browse websites and Pinterest, and talk to friends, make notes of any recipes you want to try and add the winners to your master recipe list!

Here’s a short list of categorized dinner meal ideas to help you get started:

• Sandwiches: Burgers, chicken club, Grilled Cheese, BLTs
• Pasta: Spaghetti, stuffed shells, Alfredo, Pasta Salad
• Baked Dishes: Almond Crusted Baked Chicken, Hemp and Herb Crusted Pork Chops, sheet pan dinners like this Sheet Pan Sausage and Veggies
• Grill: whole chicken or tri-tip (both make excellent leftovers for tacos or fajitas!), or grab some ideas from my 1 Week Grilling Meal Plan
• Soup/Salad: Minestrone Italian Soup, Caesar Salad, Instant Pot Chicken Noodle Soup, Cranberry Apple Spinach Salad
• Potatoes: Ridiculously Easy Potato Skins, Shepherd’s Pie, Slow Cooker Potato Soup
• New Dish: whatever I find in a magazine, blog, or Pinterest that I want to try – you can add these to whatever categories they fit in if they’re keepers!
• Casseroles: chicken/broccoli/rice, Breakfast Casserole, Enchilada Casserole
• Slow Cooker: Pot Roast, Carnitas, Whole Chicken, Slow Cooker Meatless Lasagna

6. MEAL PLANNING TEMPLATE FOR BREAKFAST AND LUNCHES

So far in our planning of meals, we’ve focused primarily on dinners, but we can’t neglect planning for breakfast and lunch!

Just as you did for dinner, use the first five steps and work through breakfast and lunch.

Your meal planning template for breakfast and lunch can include some favorites, but you may not always need a detailed list for these meals…

Sometimes it is easier to have some grab-and-go options available to create a snack lunch or plan on eating leftovers whenever they’re available instead of having a very specific meal planned out.

Breakfast and lunch are also more forgiving when it comes to repeating meals. You can get away with having 2 to 3 options and repeating them during the week, whereas you’ll likely make different dinners each day.

You can decide how detailed you want to get here when figuring out how to plan meals for a week.

Try these breakfast menu planning ideas:

• Muffins are a family favorite in my house for breakfast and I prefer to make a big batch to last us through the entire week.
• Oatmeal is another option that is easy to keep on hand.
• Homemade Granola and fresh fruit are great to keep meal planning simple.

Freezing baked goods like muffins, pancakes, and breakfast breads saves you lots of time when you have days when you need to leave the house early.

And here are some meal planning ideas for lunches:

• Leftovers are my default option for lunch. You already made the food, so you might as well use it up!
• If you’re packing school lunches or sending lunch to work with your spouse, plan options that work with their schedule.
• Easily customizable meals like Homemade Lunchables are also a great choice for lunch menu plans.

7. MEAL PLANNING YOUR WAY

Remember that meal planning is about getting organized and saving money – according to what YOU eat. It’s not about conforming to meal planning guides that show what someone else does or trying to impress with cooking skills.

• If you don’t enjoy making your own pasta sauce or chicken stock, then buy your favorite.
• Plan one-pot meals or casseroles if you like to eat them.
• Even if you’re a classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich type of home – keep it up!
• Don’t plan meals with beans if you don’t like them.

My point is that your dinners don’t have to have the perfect blend of meat, starch, veggie, and salad. My plan reflects the nutrition goals and food preferences of my family.

We don’t eat out much, and definitely not fast food, (for a variety of reasons, not just nutrition). I enjoy cooking and baking and am fortunate enough to have a very forgiving family when recipes don’t work out as planned (which does happen!).

8. THE SHOPPING LIST

I prefer to make a big bulk shopping trip at the beginning of the month, and then make little trips throughout the month for fresh produce and dairy as needed. Incorporating in-season produce into your meal plans and following these other tips to save on produce can cut down on expenses and help maximize your purchases.

Whether you like to shop at the start of the month or shop every week, here’s my basic method for creating a shopping list:

1. Keep a piece of paper on the fridge. As an item runs low or out, write it on the list.
2. As I add specific meals to the meal plan, I add the ingredients to the grocery list that I need to complete the recipes.
3. Review the list and see if I can substitute for something I already have, like making Homemade Coconut Milk instead of buying it.
4. When I’m ready to shop, I write down what grocery store I plan to shop at. (C for Costco, A for ALDI, and W for Walmart, etc.)

You could even keep semi-permanent grocery lists for separate stores if you have items you buy each week. I do this for produce and other items we keep on hand like eggs, cauliflower, carrots, celery, bananas, pears, peppers, and sweet potatoes.

MEAL PLANNING FAQS

WHAT IF I DON’T WANT TO MEAL PLAN?

This is the method I used when I first started meal planning, but I totally get that meal planning is not everyone’s strong suit. If you’d rather have a meal plan ready to go for you instead of creating one yourself, I recommend checking into my quarterly meal plans: 30 Minute Dinners. This is a great idea because:

• These meal plans are designed to help you spend less on food and have already helped 8000+ people save money on groceries.
• The meal plans also come with shopping lists, prep lists, and even ideas for breakfast and lunch. It’s literally an all-inclusive package for eating real food on a budget!

Meal planning is just one component of making your grocery budget work. If you want to dive into more than just meal planning, check out my course Grocery Budget Bootcamp. Enrollment is currently closed, but you can check out my FREE Fight Inflation Workshop. You’ll get access to three AMAZING video sessions focused on how to save money on food right now, despite rising grocery costs.

MORE MENU PLANNING TIPS