How to Create a Successful Meal Plan

It’s 4:00p.m. and dad will be home in an hour or 2. All the kids are starting to bicker, whine, or running aimlessly with nothing to do. You’re just trying to keep your head from spinning and then you realize…. “I have no idea what I’m making for dinner!!”

This was me a couple years ago…..

I always seemed to hit a rut at the end of the day when everything was going haywire and I’m scrambling to make something healthy that everyone would eat. I have always been semi-good at making meal plans but I was never really good at keeping them.

 I have tried making one every month that coincides with the days of the month and shopping for the whole month at one time, making one each week and shopping for the week, and making a plan each day with what I have on hand. Those are all great plans but just never seemed to work quite right for me. Either I couldn’t think of something to make or what I had planned just wasn’t fitting into the schedule.

Low and behold I finally found a meal plan that works for us AND I’m not stressed out at the 4:00 hour because I have no idea what to make. I created a template that gives me a 4-week Monday through Sunday plan. There are no dates attached to each day but essentially it is a months’ worth of meals planned. Any time I have free time I will create another 4-week meal plan and just stick it in my sheet protector on the side of my fridge. I am up to 3 months’ worth of meals planned for my family right now.

How this works is my plans stay on the side of my fridge, in a sheet protector hooked on with two magnetic hooks.

 I do one large Amazon order a month and one large Costco run a month for all my bulk staple ingredients that we don’t already grow or raise here on the homestead. Every Sunday night, I look at the week we are on. Since there are no dates on the days, I just run through all 4 weeks and then rotate the sheet to another month’s worth and start at week 1 again. I will make sure I have all the ingredients for the weeks’ worth of meals on hand. If I need anything, I will run to the local grocery store and grab the few items I need for that week’s meals. Usually, at this time I know if there is something unexpected that came up for the week and I need to “tweak” the schedule a bit. I don’t go and try and plan a whole new meal for that day, I just simply swap it with another day, so the same food is being made just made on different days to fit our schedule for that week.

When making my meal plans, I take into account the nights that my girls have out of the house activities or nights I know The Rancher won’t be home for dinner (in which case, breakfast for dinner… woohoo!). For example, on Mondays the girls do gymnastics and we don’t get home until dinner time. So, on all my meal plans you will see Monday is ALWAYS a crockpot meal for dinner. Likewise, Thursdays The Rancher is not home for dinner. So, Thursdays are ALWAYS breakfast for dinner, the girls and my favorite! This simplifies my life and, in the future, if either of those nights out of the house change, I will then tweak my meal plan.

When you make the decision to live a healthier lifestyle and only put good wholesome foods in your body it is important to have a plan otherwise it makes it harder to do. Without a plan made you don’t have the right ingredients on hand, and you will find yourself just grabbing pizza because it is convenient on a busy night. I am by no means bashing pizza… because we love pizza! BUT, if you have all the ingredients to make a meal AND have the meal planned for you so you don’t have to think about it, the temptation to just grab a meal out while on your way home is less and you know what your feeding your family is good because you made it!

There definitely is some time invested in these meal plans up front but let me just say that they were the BEST templates I ever created. I am naturally a very organized, OCD person but having my meals planned out for months in advance has been even better then I imagined!

I promise once you take the time to create these you won’t regret it. Never again will you hit that 4pm deer in a head light look, thinking “what am I going to make for dinner!”

**If you would like a blank template of my meal plan, email me and I would be happy to share it!