My Simple Meal Plan Guide For Beginners

What should I have tonight? 

Ever heard yourself mutter those words as you scan the fridge for ideas? Only to find you have a few eggs and some mouldy veg. I’ve been there, stomach rumbling, eyeing up the apps on my phone that will deliver me something tasty in a snap! Even travelling home after a long day knowing I have nothing in the fridge. Making plans in my head about what groceries I could buy on the way home to make a quick meal. Poor food choices, weight gain, all added to the sluggishness I felt every, single, day. But you can do better – I certainly have – if you meal plan…

Meal Plan vs. Meal-Prep

One thing I want to cover before we start is the difference between a meal plan and meal prepping. The latter is literally what it says on the tin, meal preparation. In this post, we won’t be covering meal preparation (much). There are a plethora of blogs with all kinds of different tips from nutritionists to sports enthusiasts that can give you wonderful meal ideas and how to prepare them in advance. However, in this post, we will cover the planning. A simple guide to know what you will have and when you will have it and why. And don’t worry, there’s still room for take-aways!

Let’s get down to the benefits of meal planning. 

Having a plan saves you from:

• Wasting time (in more ways than one!)
• Potentially, wasting money
• Food waste!
• Using valuable energy thinking up meals on the spot
• Making poor diet choices

Unfortunately, not all of us are Hollywood celebrities that have in-house chefs or seasoned athletes with nutritionists and perfectly portioned meals to hand. But we all have the ability to be a tiny bit more organised. Now, there are companies out there that do supply ingredients for the week where you can prepare the food in “20 minutes”, eliminating choice and time, but not money. They can be quite costly. When you’re a family of 4 (maybe more) that option starts to make a dent in the bank. So how do we plan? Let me show you.

Rory’s Weekly Meal Plan

I am sharing with you – free of charge – my very, very basic meal plan. It’s as basic as it gets. Too complicated, I know I won’t use it, so why should you? All I want to know when it comes to planning for meals is:

• What am I going to eat that day?
• What ingredients do I need?
• Is there anything I can prepare in advance?
• A link to a recipe if I don’t know how to make it

I break this down into chunks, then into weeks. I find it best if I plan ahead a week or two. The last thing you want is to get to the end of the week and Monday is blank, you don’t have the groceries you need and so the old cycle starts over again… Big unhappy emoji.

And the reasons for those 4 questions tie into so much.

What am I going to eat that day?

Planning what you are going to eat ahead of time helps with cutting down your decision-making effort. I wrote a post on Decision Fatigue and why it’s important, here. Thinking about what you will have to eat, whether that’s breakfast, lunch or dinner on a day-by-day basis just adds an additional decision to make on that day. Especially when it comes to dinner.

Say you’ve had a long day at work, or you’re a stay-at-home mum or dad. Do you really want to add another decision to your plate (pardon the pun)? Plus, this may not always be a decision for you. You may have a family, kids, a girlfriend or boyfriend, the decision weight can be a lot bigger than you realise. Spending a few minutes a week thinking of meals will put all of that energy into one focused activity and then it’s done. You don’t need to think about it anymore. Don’t need to ‘pop to the shops’. You can look at the list and go, ‘oh, hell yeah! Fajitas tonight!’.

What ingredients do I need? 

Why go to the shop 20 times a week, when you can go once? You save time and ultimately, you save money. Have you ever shopped on an empty stomach, not knowing what to have? Looking at all the easy meals, the tasty snacks and treats, thinking mmm, get in my belly? I have. If you know what groceries you need, you can go shopping with a focused purpose. This helps prevent straying to the snack aisle, being dazzled by the catchy slogans for the treats on offer. You have a list. You stick to it.

Another important tip in regards to saving time and money is that you can check your pantry ahead of time too. Do I have the seasoning I need for the meals I have planned? Yes. If you want spaghetti bolognese and you can’t remember whether you have pasta, planning ahead of time means you can check in time. This prevents over-buying for things you don’t need and spending money on snacks you might not necessarily buy if you have a focused list.

Is there anything I can prepare in advance? 

This is a useful one and leans into meal preparation. Without going into too much detail about how to meal prep, planning ahead about meals will help you understand where you can save a bit of time. If you know you have spaghetti bolognese planned for Tuesday dinner and you have a bit of time to spare on Sunday during the day, why not prepare some bolognese ahead of time? When it comes to Tuesday, you can warm it up on the hob in minutes, get the pasta on and be ready to eat almost as quick as a ready meal. 

I regularly enjoy stir-fries, teriyaki salmon, pad thai, you name it! On a Sunday if I don’t have much going on, you might find me chopping carrots into batons, marinating tofu (or meat). Anything that means when I finish up for the day, I can slap together some tidy grub and spend my evening winding down. It doesn’t always have to be Sunday either, if you get up early in the morning and you have time between preparing breakfast, you can chop a few veggies up for the evening ahead too.

A link to a recipe

A relatively minor point, but if you don’t know how to make something or you just need a little guidance, having the link (or even the recipe) to hand, is useful. Know what page the recipe is in a cookbook? Note the cookbook name down and the page number instead. There are no excuses to put off cooking it then and you always have everything you need for that meal in one spot:

The meal, the ingredients, the prep (if any), the recipe.

Before you go off thinking of meals for the week(s) ahead, let me share a few extra points to using this planner. 

When I have spoken with friends and family about my meal planning method, a few have said to me (and you may be thinking this too):

And that’s perfectly fine! There are no strict rules we must abide by, this simply is a tool to help organise ourselves and buy back a little time (and money). I don’t always want what I have planned on a day, I just don’t feel like it. Tofu and greens, boring! What was I thinking when I put that down? Well, I know it’s relatively healthy, so that’s a start. 

To compromise on this, as you already have all of your ingredients ready to go there is nothing stopping you from moving meals around in that week. Don’t fancy fajitas tonight? Really craving some carbs and can’t wait until Thursday for carbonara? Swap them out. As long as the ingredients stay fresh and you can use them, why not? 

It was a long-lasting tradition in my family and didn’t always happen every week (finances, parents’ work schedules, etc.), but we would sometimes order in food on Fridays as a treat. In my examples on the free meal planner I have provided, you will see I have marked in take-away night. Plan for it. 

This is a tough one, an impromptu after-work drink, events, late-night shifts, etc. we all have weeks where things don’t always quite go to plan. But we can kind of plan for the unplanned. If you know these kinds of things can pop up and as much as I advocate fresh produce, try to meal plan things that have a long shelf-life. If you don’t make it home for spaghetti bolognese but you already went to the effort of making the bolognese earlier in the week, you can freeze it. This means if you skip that meal, it will keep in the freezer and can go into next week’s plan. 

Lastly, if you can stick to this and really try to plan ahead, you can avoid costly take-aways. You can get back control of what you eat, know what is going into your food and maybe even take up a new hobby. Learn some new recipes, fall in love with cooking. I spent a lot on take-aways and they really add up. It’s not only something that can be used for dinners, it can be used for lunches, breakfasts, trips, you name it! However, I know how we can be tired in the evening and if there’s any way we can take the pressure off and make it easier, this is one of them that’s really helped me. I hope it helps you too. Let me know in the comments!