I’m doing this for weight loss purposes, but I noticed that it saves me even more time on meal planning and grocery shopping. Right now, I’ve simplified my nutrition to several clean, tasty and healthy meals that I repeatedly eat throughout the whole week. If my partner wants to eat something else, we try to think of two meals with similar ingredients to make sure we’re not buying too many products that we can physically use up until they expire.

Otherwise, I simply decide on my favorite healthy meals and write them down in my weekly meal planner template. To help myself decide what I want, I love scrolling through Pinterest to see if there are any new recipes I like. I don’t recommend Saturday for this task because Saturdays are for fun. Meal planning is simple, but one thing is essential – you have to develop a habit of sitting down for 15-20 minutes every once in a while (Sunday or Monday work great!) and thinking of meals that would suit your entire week. Some (including the free meal planner template you will find below) also include a shopping list so you can also plan your purchases before grocery shopping. It usually includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner choices.

I saved a lot of money since I wasn’t buying too much unnecessary food or food for “in case someone comes over.”Ī meal plan is a list of meals in a form of a planned menu for every upcoming weekday.

Even when I was tired, I always knew what I am going to cook.Ī healthy meal plan meant there was no more energy wasted on googling meal recipes.

I was able to coordinate the whole week of meals with my partner to make sure both of us are happy with the food choices we made.

I managed to eat a very clean and healthy diet, just like I always wanted.

I stopped throwing out tons of expired ingredients that I didn’t use up (it’s horrible, I know… I’m completely ashamed of it and I just want to forget about it).

Once I started planning my meals, here’s what happened in my life. However, there are a ton of meal planning benefits that aren’t related to health! You avoid overeating and you can stay on track with your health or weight loss goals. You can avoid unhealthy choices that happen when you’re really hungry and can’t decide what’s your best (or fastest!) option to cook. When you plan your meals, either using a meal planner template or a meal planning app, you control what, when, and how much you’re eating. The most important reason to plan your meals is health. In this article, I’m sharing a free meal planner template & my favorite meal planning tips, ideas, and tricks to help you quickly become a meal planning pro. Meal planning, however, helped me to improve this part of life and I think it can help you too! I used to never plan my meals, and it always ended up in a food disaster.Įither I ate something quick and unhealthy or bought tons of food to cook just to never actually decide WHAT to cook.

It helps me to stay on track with healthy eating and saves me a ton of time choosing what’s for dinner or while shopping for groceries.

Printable free dinner only meal planner