#Monthly menu planner template free how to
#Monthly menu planner template free free

Start with the first dish and write down all the ingredients you’ll need to buy on the right half of the meal planner template to begin creating a grocery shopping list. Fill out what you want to eat for each day of the week.

To illustrate how meal planning works, let’s walk you through the steps using our free printable meal planning template as a guide.

How to Meal Plan - Step-by-step Instructions By meal planning, you can make sure that you have a use for the entire produce, box, or can of everything you buy. This is bad for both the environment and your pocketbook. Here is an example you can try:īelieve it or not, Americans waste on average a pound of food per person per day. Since most people do their meal planning on weekends or when they have some downtime, they have the leisure to explore online and look for new recipes they want to try.įor some, it helps to have themes for each night to guide what kind of recipe they'll look for. Meal planning gives you the opportunity to ensure that you can coming up with a wide variety of dishes for your family. One of the most common complaints people have about home meals is that they feel like they are stuck eating the same things over and over. This ensures you get the healthy mix you want. You can start off deciding what specific vegetable or healthy ingredient you want to feature each night, then choose a recipe that showcases it. If you want to incorporate more fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes into your diet, meal planning is a excellent way to do that. Trying to figure out what ingredients you have on hand and what you can make for dinner isn’t always as easy as it sounds, but meal planning completely eliminates this burden. Reduce stressĪgain, having to making decisions after a long day at work is not ideal, but there’s no reason you have to if you meal plan. This eliminates having to make extra, unexpected trips to the grocery store because you realized that you were missing an ingredient for the dinner you had just decided you want to make tonight. When you meal plan ahead, you are pre-identifying everything you need so you can shop for the necessary items all at once. Before you dismiss meal planning though, let us show you all the ways it will make your life so much better. The alternative to meal planning is to just decide what you’ll eat as each day comes along. Our free template is blank, so you can choose only the meals you want and use it anyway you see fit.Īlthough there is such a thing as a monthly meal plan, most people think ahead only about a week at a time when it comes to their meals, so our template is designed for weekly use. If you happen to not like any of the meals, though, it might not be easy to remove the ingredients from the shopping list that pertain to the meal you don’t want, and then add in the items for the meal you’d rather replace it with.įortunately, meal planning can be totally customizable and is super simple to do on your own. It's pretty easy to find premade meal plans online, that have pre-chosen meal recipes and corresponding grocery lists already organized into a convenient, printable form. However, to maximize all the potential benefits of meal planning, the best way to meal plan is to do it formally, by writing out your plan in a calendar or meal planner template (like the free one we have at the bottom of this post!). Whenever you know ahead of time what you’re planning to eat later that week, you are already informally meal planning.įor example, if you know to always keep cereal in stock because that’s what your family eats every morning, that’s technically meal planning. At its core, the basic idea behind meal planning is pretty simple: deciding beforehand what you’re going to eat for the rest of the week.

#Monthly menu planner template free free

#Monthly menu planner template free how to