How to start a healthy meal plan routine on a budget!

If there’s one routine I swear by as busy mum of three kids on a budget (who’s not naturally organised) …it’s making a weekly meal plan.  For the 10 minutes it takes each week, meal planning has the biggest payoff in terms of keeping our kitchen stress-free, our meals healthy, and our food budget low. If you’re trying to stick to a food budget without stress, or bring peace to your dinner routine – we’re going to walk though the process and how to hone it to serve your life!

Our family of 5 has a monthly budget of £500 to cover all our food and drink at home and on the go. That’s well below the national UK average for a household of our size and age, and we also use our budget to choose things like choose fairtrade, local, and organic produce. The only way we can even begin to make that happen is to go through this careful process each week – and I promise, it becomes a quick routine each week that’s so rewarding.

Building a successful meal planning habit without stress is a learning process. Week on week we can learn from our meal planning and get it right for us so have patience with the process. I’d highly recommend using a notebook where you can make a meal plan each week, keep your shopping lists, and use them to learn, and draw inspiration from your own previous weeks. 

BEFORE STARTING YOUR MEAL PLAN

1. Ask yourself why you are meal planning!

There are so many reasons to meal plan, and knowing why you’re doing it will help you draw the right things from it. Are you trying to save money? Stick to a certain budget? To bring peace and emilinate the “what’s for dinner?” question and the mental load of constantly planning meals? Or are you trying to avoid last minute meals and takeout? Or maybe you’re trying to increase your protein, or cut out snacking by prioritising planned family meals.  Figure out what you need to gain from this, or what your pain point is and it will serve you well.

2. Decide exactly what needs planning.

There are many different ways to create a meal plan and my recommendation would be to start with 21 meals a week, breakfast lunch and dinner each day, along with any other meals that are needed in your home. If there’s always an after school snack time, add that. If there’s always a kid dinner and then an adult dinner – add those as columns. Some parts may become intuitive, but I think for really careful planning – its helpful to put everything down on paper. 

That said, you may want to only plan dinners, or dinners during the week and lunches too at the weekends. There are many different ways to plan. This is a process to serve YOU, not to constrain you or to fit your life into boxes that don’t work for you. 

3. Know your numbers!

You don’t have to have a budget to meal plan, but if you’re trying to get your spending “down” its really helpful to know what you’re actually aiming for. THIS video is a walk through how to find the ideal budget number for you and your home, and THIS is a walk through how to practically use Monzo for ethical, sustainable and effective budgeting.

I find it helpful to take the food monthly and divide it into a per week, per day, and per meal budget to help us effectively plan things out. Knowing those numbers really helps keep things on track as we plan meals and shop – it’s not just one big monthly number that’s hard to translate to real life.

MEAL PLAN TEMPLATE FOR SIMPLE MEAL PLANNING

You can download or print the structure I like to use here:

The Weekly Meal Planning Routine

STEP 1:  Draw or print your meal plan template

You can download the style of template I use above or just scribble something yourself. I often end up scribbling mine on the back of a piece of scrap paper, it just matters that it’s a structure that works for your life. If you’re not sure – print the one above or draw 7 days and 3 meals on each.

STEP 2: Before starting your meal plan, look at what food you have that needs using up.

Start by looking in your kitchen, fridge and cupboards! What’s left over that needs eating? Make a note of those things on the “to use up” space on the template. To make sure nothing goes to waste, we’re going to plan those things into the meal plan as we start.

A huge part of saving money is making sure that absolutely nothing goes to waste. So at the same time as writing it on the meal plan – ask yourself “Why is that leftover?” Did you plan too much of something? Did you think you’d make a meal you didn’t make? Did you end up grabbing food out and not eat at home? Having some idea of why food is leftover can help us adjust well and shop a step better next time. And that’s the goal – learning each week and planning one step better the next time!

STEP 3: Look at your calendar and make notes of what meals you need or don’t need on the meal plan.

Look at what meals need planning for the upcoming week and make notes on the meal plan. I grab the weekly calendar and see what’s happening. I’ll note how many extra or fewer people are there at each meal. I’ll also add any meals that have no prep time, or meals we need on the go or need to be fully prepped ahead of time. This way we’ll plan in appropriate meals and we’ll actually stick to the plan! 

A plan is no good if it doesn’t serve our real life. 

STEP 4: Add in any regular meals that you always have in certain spots – or start a habit!

Meal routines can be a really good way to take the pressure off planning and thinking about every meal.  I like to have a few meals in the week that we always do AND that I know come in on budget. It takes some of the creative energy out of the planning process and the kids like having that routine in our eating. If you don’t have any of these regular meal routines it’s ok! As you plan, look at what meals come in on budget as see which you might want

• We always start weekends with waffles on a Saturday morning, and Saturday nights are homemade pizza. Sunday nights are leftovers meals, eggs and baked beans. We have granola on Monday and Tuesday mornings as they’re early mornings in our home. We’ll also always do a soup, and a Mac and cheese meal, and rice and bean bowls meal at some point in the week. 

STEP 5: Find a way to add in whatever you noted was in the kitchen. 

Go back to the “To Use Up” section and see where you can work in those ingredients. Can you add any of them to the regular meals you eat? If you have pizza night – can you add any leftovers on top of the pizza? If they can’t be added to the routine meals, then they’re the first items we want to use in the rest of the meals as we plan. Remember: If there are things with a short expiration date make sure they’re early in the meal plan!

STEP 6: Once you’ve filled in any regular meals, and used up anything that needs to be used it’s time to fill in all the rest of the meals.

This is our first meal plan of the year as we get back into the routine after the holidays:

This can be the hard part. How you fill in the remaining meals changes the budget, the prep time, the way the week looks. Learning how to do that doesn’t happen in a week. Every week you meal plan, you can learn which meals actually work well, which meals fit the budget well, which meals work with prep time and where they fit in your week. It’s not a one week process. That’s why I suggest keeping your previous weeks’ meal plans so you can make notes and learn each week.

To start working out what meals are budget friendly, look at what staples are cheaper (and carry your values) where you live. Some things are more universal like beans and rice, pulses, simple whole grains, and in season local fruits and veggies, but things differ. A key to building a budget friendly meal plan is starting by looking at what foods and basics are cheaper and building meals around those things. You’ll also want to assess what protein sources are most cost effective for you. In THIS blog post I take a look at our go to budget protein sources for our family’s low cost whole food meal plans.

Even within items like beans and grains, and local fruits there will be price differences by weight. So get used to looking at per pound/kg prices to find the best prices. Lastly, start to be aware of how much of something it takes to make a meal – cost wise. As you build week to week, you want to be able to note how much each meal costs to make – or at least whether it’s a higher or lower cost meal.

BUILDING A MASTER MEAL LIST FOR MEAL PLANNING

Week by week it can be helpful to build your own Master Meal List.  This is just a list of all your go to meals, and then any notes on the time they take, how many they feed, how much they cost, where the recipe lives. That way, when you go to fill in the meals into the empty spots on your meal plan. You can find our family’s master meal list on THIS video here, it’s in the caption. A lot of our every day recipes are grouped together in this Whole Basics ebook on Shopify if you need some ideas and recipe.

Building on your Weekly Meal Planning Routine

Creating a successful meal planning habit really is something that’s learned over time, so give it time. Put your meal plan up in the kitchen, shop by it, and cook by it! It won’t all go the way you planned – life is life. Switch meals around, use the food you bought, note how much you spent, learn for next week.

Then next week, take what you learned from your week and build your next plan one step better!