You don’t have to make life hard on yourself. And you don’t have to make meal planning complicated either!
At one time I really stressed over planning out meals for our family. I had a very nice grided sheet with all of these boxes I needed to fill in for the week.
It had breakfast, snack, lunch, snack and dinner.
Yes, seriously.
And I would fill it out each Sunday afternoon once we finished lunch so that I could go to the grocery store and buy all the things we would need to make this plan happen.
It STRESSED me OUT! On at least one occasion I ended up in irrational tears from the frustration of having to have it all figured out and on another occasion, I just threw it on the floor and said: “whatever, I’m sure we’ll eat something!”
I honestly don’t remember now, but I’m sure we did eat something. Although it was probably fast food and multiple trips to the grocery store that week.
Have I told you that sometimes I try to do life perfectly?
Have I told you that there’s no such thing as doing life perfectly? (That’s another blog post I suppose that we’ll save for later.)
Let’s just go ahead now and say it, “No one is perfect. We’re all just doing the best that we can and figuring it out as we go.”
Deep breath. You’ve got this!
Okay, so now onto the meal planning tactic that I’ve found is easier for our family.
Let’s call it a 5 Day Flexible Meal Plan.
- Step 1: Look in your refrigerator and see what you already have that’s still fresh to eat.
- Step 2: What recipes can you prepare with what you already have? Ask your family for input. If we have chicken I’ll ask them, “What are your favorite chicken meals?” or “What chicken meal would you like this week?”
- Step 3: Write down the meals you want to eat during the week on our 5 Day Flexible Meal Plan freebie. You don’t even have to do all 3 categories. My husband, Greg, doesn’t usually eat breakfast so we usually just plan out breakfast for the kids and I. My daughter likes to eat the lunches at school so I don’t plan lunches that often either. A lot of time leftovers become lunches for us.
- Step 4: Make a list of what you still need for the meals that you’ve chosen for the week in the shopping list column. Most of the time we need to grab more vegetables.
- Step 5: Go shopping. If you need some snacks, grab some nuts, fruits, popcorn, something you know you or the kids will eat that’s still good for them.
- Step 6: Before you go to bed each night go ahead and decide what meals you want tomorrow. We like writing ours down on a small dry erase board. I may not know on Sunday that I will want tacos on Thursday, but by Thursday night I might know that I’d really like chicken the next day. That’s the joy of the flexible meal plan!
- Step 7: You’re ready to cook and eat!
- Step 8: Repeat the process when you’ve eaten all of your planned meals. You might have some foods leftover in the refrigerator that are still good because life happens. You may have eaten dinner with friends one night or ended up eating sandwiches because there just wasn’t enough time to actually prepare and cook dinner before the school meeting.
Give yourself some grace. Be flexible. Make meal planning easy on yourself.
This kind of meal planning works really well for our family. Let me know if you try it or what works best for your family!
Cook up one of our family favorite recipes tonight–Verde Chicken!
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