Meal Planning 101: Choose a Day to Plan

Do this once a week to start making meal planning work for you.

Meal planning. Ok! But how do you start?

Oh the dreaded question: what’s for dinner? This simple question can often be a trigger for the home cook. We all have to eat. And most of us want to look forward to a tasty dinner. So what’s the deal?

I talk to a lot of people about cooking. What they love about it. What they find stressful. What they want to improve. And a common frustration that runs through these conversations is decision fatigue.

Meals require A LOT of decisions. The answer to the question what’s for dinner involves much more than a simple decision about what to eat. Decisions about timing, ingredients, recipes (if cooking), budget, and often dietary restrictions and/or health goals are all involved. And that is a lot to process. Not just for dinner, but all of the meals in your day. Having to make all those decisions around meals multiple times a day, day after day is a lot to process. That’s where meal planning comes to the rescue.

Making Decisions about Meals

Meal planning is simply making a bunch of decisions about meals all at once so you don’t have to think about it again for another week. Or month (yes! I know several people who plan out meals for the month). Meal planning is efficiency at its best. You sit down and decide. Then you make sure you have all the resources you need to execute the plan. Set that plan in motion, stick to it, and voila! All the time you would have spent thinking through what to eat or make each day is freed up. Decision fatigue is averted and you have more time and energy back for the more important things in your life. By meal planning you can actually build more margin into your days.

Start Small, Be Intentional

I imagine if you are reading this you’re still trying to figure out how to make meal planning work. Let me encourage you to start small. Maybe you’ve tried meal planning and it was too overwhelming. Perhaps you tried to plan too much. Why not start with dinner for 5 days.

Around here we meal plan to kick the stress out of our kitchen, not to win the internet. In case it needs to be said, meal planning is not the process of perfectly preparing all the things into perfectly portioned containers for photo bragging on the ‘gram or Pinterest. Even I am intimidated by those photos, and to be honest, that is not what meal planning or meal prepping looks like in my kitchen. Not. At. All.

As with any endeavor, you need to know why you are doing it. Without purpose, plans crumble. Set your intention for meal planning. And remember your why. If you need some help on figure this part out, check out this post I wrote a while back on being intentional around food choices.

Meal planning can go awry if you try to do too much. It make take some time for you to work out your own system or scale up to meal planning for an entire week (or month!). It’s a process, but the payoff is so worth it.

Choose one day to meal plan and make all of those decisions at once to save time and energy for more important things.

So, where do you start?

Choose a day to meal plan.

That’s it! Choose one day and make a meal plan. Which day? Any day that makes sense for your schedule.

Some people meal plan on Sunday or Monday morning for the week. I meal plan on Thursday nights. Why? No idea, but that’s what works for me and when I meal plan on Thursday nights, I stick to the plan. Do what works for you. Make some decisions and write them down.

The planning part will look different for everyone. We’re going to dig into that a bit more in this series. We’ll look at methods for writing your plan, strategies to help you decide what to eat more quickly, and how to hack your grocery store trip. But for now, simply choose a day and make a plan. Start small; decide what you are going to eat for dinner for the next 5 days. Need some inspiration? I have several free meal plans you can look over in the What We’re Eating Series.

You’ve got this!

Step 1: Choose a day and make a plan. Still having trouble with decisions? Set a timer and by the time runs out have decided on dinners for the next 5 days.

Want more?

We’re talking Kitchen Essentials at The Wandering Hearth this year. In this series we are focusing on Meal Planning 101. And if you want to learn more right now, I’ve got a free meal planning template to get you started. It includes:

A quick start guide on how to meal plan
A planner template
A sample week of meal planning from my kitchen
Directions on how to write a detailed (block) plan
The lazy version of meal planning (no judgement here, we’ve all got more important things to do than worry about meals three times a day!)

Grab your copy below by joining The Hearthside mailing list.