10 Tips for Successful Meal Planning

Once a week when I was growing up, my parents would have my brothers and me go through our cookbooks and cooking magazines to each pick out one meal we wanted to try and write down the ingredients we needed to buy at the grocery store for that recipe. We also had to check to see what we had in the cupboards already to avoid purchasing ingredients we had on hand.

Now that I’m older and living on my own, I do the same, except I have to plan a meal for every day. So on Sunday mornings, I comb through my cookbooks, recipes torn out of magazines, and my favorite cooking blogs, and plan what I’m going to eat for the week.

Why? Meal planning saves me time and money, and it can for you, too. Plus, it will save you a lot of stress, says Ruthy Kirwan, creator of PercolateKitchen.com. “Speaking to other parents who were in my position where they’re tired and they’re stressed, and they’re coming home from a long day, the kitchen and cooking and figuring out what to make for dinner is the last thing they want to do at the end of a long day,” she says. “But if you sit down for maybe five to ten minutes at the start of the week, and you look at how your schedule is, figure out what’s in your kitchen already, and then work that into a plan…[it] can save you a ton of time and stress throughout the next seven days.”

Meal planning is a money-saver because “you’re not going to end up ordering in as much or doing takeout or going to whatever the closest store is that may not have the items [you need] on sale,” says Jessica Levinson, M.S., R.D.N., C.D.N. It also cuts down on food waste, Levinson adds, whether it’s picking two meals that include fresh parsley so you’re not throwing any away (or composting it) or enjoying leftovers for lunch the next day.

Levinson also notes that meal planning helps to ensure you have healthy, balanced meals on the table each night, and that you have all the ingredients in the house to make those balanced meals.

I’ve been a practicing meal-planner for almost 20 years and consider myself to be a bit of an expert. Keep these tips in mind when starting out, and you, too, will be an expert in no time.

RELATED: Find Nutritionists in Your Area
    

Tips for Successful Meal Planning

Don’t bite off more than you can chew (pun intended!). Both Levinson and Kirwan recommend starting out by planning meals for two to three days and doing what you typically do (order takeout, cook a frozen pizza, eat leftovers) for the rest of the week. “This way you’re not overdoing it and setting yourself up for something that you can’t stick to,” Levinson says. Once you have those few days down, you can add more and eventually plan out meals for the whole week.

In fact, Levinson suggests planning a night of leftovers. “If it’s a family favorite, your kids won’t be upset that they’re having baked ziti two nights in a row because some kids would have that every night if they could,” she adds.
    

Have your schedule for the week handy. Do you have to work late one night, do the kids have after-school activities that will run close to dinnertime, is it date night for you and your partner? These are all things to take into consideration when planning meals for the week. “Be realistic about your abilities and the amount of time you have to cook, and when in doubt, don’t worry about eating leftovers or a frozen pizza,” Kirwan says.
    

Stockpile recipes. Levinson suggests creating a board on Pinterest to pin easy, quick weeknight meals so you have a go-to database of recipes. “Same with any cookbooks you have or recipes you pull out from magazines,” she says. “This way you’re not always having to come up with something new, but you have at your fingertips a group of resources to pull recipes from.”

RELATED: Browse Our Favorite Family-Friendly Recipes
    

Chain your meals, as Kirwan says. This is essentially building one meal off of another. For example, if you make chicken enchiladas for dinner one night, cook extra chicken to use in your Alfredo dish for the next night. This way, part of your dinner is already prepped and you save time. “People think it needs to be a brand-new item every evening, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be. In fact, if it is a brand-new item every evening, then it sets you up for failure from the get-go,” Kirwan says.
    

Keep your picky eaters in mind, but don’t make yourself crazy. Meal planning helps cut your time in the kitchen, so planning separate meals for your picky eaters is counterintuitive. Kirwan says she makes sure to have at least one thing her 3-year-old daughter enjoys and will eat on the menu, as well as something new. “She doesn’t have to eat [the new food], but she gets comfortable seeing that it’s there,” she says.