Sarahritchie17 Meal planning has become an important part of my weekend routine. I’ve been writing out 2-week meal plans for the past year, and it’s proven to save money, time, and food waste—a win, win, win!
Here are 3 reasons I continue to meal-plan and why it may help you too:
1. You save time and money on grocery shopping.
When you plan out what you’re going to eat in advance, you know exactly what ingredients you need in what amounts, and you can even go a step further and find recipes that use similar ingredients to generate less waste. With a specific list to shop for, you streamline your shopping trips and don’t end up wandering the aisles, picking up things you don’t really need.
2. You save time and money by eating in more.
We’ll spend about $150 (for 2 people) on grocery hauls every other week. In the in-between weeks, we do a smaller lift to pick up a few extra items that we go through quick like bagels, tomatoes, and fresh fruit, spending about $50. So in total, we end up spending about $400 on groceries for two people. This budget is considering we eat out or order-in 2-4 times per month. I’ll do future posts on budgeting, but with some quick math, $400 / ([30 days in a month x 3 meals per day x 2 people] – 4 meals out) = $400 / 176 homemade meals per month = $2.27 per meal. Good luck getting that price anywhere else!
3. You’re more conscious of what you’re putting in your body.
I would assume that most people start meal planning for a diet. If you have certain dietary restrictions, you usually need to have a plan if you’re going to stick to the diet. For us, we just try to just have balance in what we eat. We try to not have any specific type of food more than 2 nights in a row. For example, not chicken quesadillas, chicken pasta, and chicken risotto Monday-Wednesday or spaghetti and meatballs, Pad Thai, and baked ziti three days in a row. Planning ahead for a week or two ensures we get a good variety and aren’t just doing what’s easy.
So, If I’ve convinced you to try it out, here are 3 tips to get started:
1. Use a calendar.
The first thing you need to do when you decide to start meal planning is to decide where you are going to keep your plan. I’ve seen beautifully crafted bulletin boards on Pinterest with the days of the week and clothes-pinned notecards with recipes printed on them. I’ve also seen apps in the App Store if you’d rather keep it digital. What works for me and my boyfriend is to have a dry erase calendar. You can get one relatively cheap at any office supply store or Target or Walmart or on Amazon. I think it helps to have something visual and tangible, but also that I can erase and change as schedule changes come up.
2. Decide the scope of your plan.
We only plan dinners. Breakfast and lunch are “fend for yourself.” We always keep bagels, pancake mix, and cereal on-hand for breakfast and sandwich and salad ingredients for lunches. There are usually some leftovers for lunches too. Decide if you want to plan all three meals or just one or two per day.
Next, decide how long you want to plan for. I like to plan 2 weeks because that’s about how often I like to do “big haul” grocery shopping.
Then, decide how often you want to eat out or order in. Sometimes you just don’t want to cook every night for 14 nights straight, sometimes you want to treat yourself, sometimes you just need to get out of the house for a bit, sometimes you’re traveling and don’t have the resources to cook for yourself. Be realistic with your personal schedule and write in some “free space” days. I like to eat out or order-in once every 1-2 weeks.
3. Set aside time to research recipes, write your plan, and build your grocery list.
This process does take some time. I probably spend up to an hour and a half once every two weeks to meal plan. Usually it’s done on a Sunday when there’s not too much else going on. How long it takes depends on how intentional you want to be with dietary restrictions and how creative you want to be about trying new recipes. We have a few go-to recipes we keep on the rotation week after week, e.g. taco Tuesdays, pizza on Friday or Saturday, crock pot pulled pork is super easy. I also like to add a new recipe to the mix every couple weeks. Making the plan for me is pretty simple, the time consuming part of the process is looking through each recipe and building a grocery list of all those ingredients.
I hope this might inspire and motivate you to start your own meal planning if you don’t do so already. Stay tuned for some recipe ideas and grocery ideas on this page in the future!
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Cheers!
Sarah
