The surprisingly simple trick that solved my meal planning headache
“I am SO tired of having to figure out what’s for dinner.”
I hear you. I was too.
Day after day after day. If you’re feeding a family, you have to take into account everybody’s preferences, nutritional needs, and schedules.
After a while, what started as a joy became a chore.
But we need to eat, so we have two choices: Plan meals in advance, or improvise.
Meal planning makes sense in theory
You know the reasons: You’ll probably eat better. You’ll shop with a list, buying only what you need, saving money and wasting less. You can get out of a rut. Save yourself annoying 5pm grocery stops. And avoid the stress of deciding what’s for dinner when tummies are growling.
So why do so many people resist meal planning?
One reason is decision fatigue.
In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, psychologist Barry Schwartz proposed that too many choices contributes to anxiety and decision fatigue.
When you think about what to make for dinner, you have the whole Internet to choose from. You probably have thousands of recipes at your fingertips in shiny cookbooks and magazines. You might have online recipes bookmarked, printed out, or hanging from the rafters.
Yet somehow you struggle to decide. How to choose the right one?
Enter the “go-to list”
If you’re familiar with my “go-to list” concept, skip forward to see how I’m using it differently now.
If you’re not, it’s simply a small collection of tried and true recipes that hit your “sweet spot” — healthy, delicious, and right for you. “Right for you” might also include quick, simple, and/or budget-friendly. Whatever matters to you.
You can keep your go-to list in a binder, a folder on your computer, or by clicking the “favourite” icon in a meal planning app. The key is to limit it to recipes you’ve made and enjoyed. Fewer choices = less stress.
Keep it slim. Recipes you want to try can go elsewhere. The special dessert you make on Thanksgiving can go elsewhere. The go-to list is for your everyday workhorse recipes only.
My go-to list came full circle
As a teen I collected recipes in a binder, which grew into two unwieldy stuffed binders. In 2013 I decided to scan all of the recipes into a note-taking app called Evernote so I could search them more easily, and take them with me everywhere.
I now have over 1200 recipes in there! It’s searchable and wonderful but truth be told, a bit cumbersome.
I use a “go-to” tag for go-to list items, and often start meal planning by filtering for that tag. At the start of this year it had grown to 96 items. Too many choices!
So a few weeks ago I culled the go-to list and printed the 64 recipes that remained, moving them to a binder in sheet protectors and coming full circle.
The trick
Following the guidance of a smart community member, when I need a meal plan, I just take out the top 1-2 recipes from each category, and voila, meal plan done. Yay!
(The categories are: Breakfast and Snacks, Legumes, Poultry, Cheese, Fish, and Side Dishes.)
I move those six recipes to the front of the binder, so that anyone in the family can see what we’re having, and start dinner if I’m not home. Once we make it, the recipe goes to the back of its section.
We’re just cycling through them in order. The benefits of meal planning without all of the decision fatigue, freeing up mental energy and time.
When we need some variety I can always browse my the larger recipe collection or a cookbook.
Saucy sides
There is actually one bit of thinking involved. Some of recipes are complete meals and some aren’t. If I pull something that isn’t, say the “Hemp-Crusted Salmon,” we had this week, then I need a side dish. That’s when I’ll pull the top one from the Side Dish category, so we have a complete meal.
What if I don’t want to make the meal on the top?
Just skip it. You can save it for the next week, or move it to the back and put it off for a few weeks. If you still don’t want it, does it really deserve a spot in your go-to list?
What if I don’t have a go-to list?
Start one! Honestly, it’s so helpful. Start by printing out any recipes that work for you. If you like a recipe in a cookbook that you own, you can make a copy for your own use.
Dedicate a page in your go-to list for each of the simple meals you don’t need a recipe for. I have one called “Snacks for Supper,” which reminds me that the family LOVES a pretty board with cheese, grapes, nuts, hummus, carrot sticks, etc.
Write that stuff down! What can YOU make for dinner without a recipe? You probably have a bigger repertoire than you think.
What if I really don’t have enough good heart-healthy recipes?
It’s time to experiment! You can start with my 6-day “go-to list” challenge, which guides you step by step through setting up your go-to list, sharing some of my favourite heart-healthy meals along the way.
Other good places to find heart-healthy recipes include Canada’s Heart & Stroke Foundation, the American Heart Association, and popular bloggers like The Mediterranean Dish and Budget Bytes. The latter aren’t explicitly heart-healthy, but most of the recipes are.
You’ll try some new things and love them, others not so much. Keep trying! Save what you do enjoy in your growing go-to list.
How big should my go-to list be?
That depends on how much you like variety. Some people are happy cycling through a week or two of meals, some get bored quickly.
On the low end, just five basic meals will set you up for a week you can repeat. Something like this:
- A grain bowl for Meatless Mondays.
- A well-seasoned taco base for Taco Tuesdays
- A favourite pasta recipe for Wednesday
(Plan leftovers for Thursdays) - A Fish Friday recipe
(Wild card Saturday – try something new or go out) - Big batch Sunday – something you can double and freeze.
With just five meals in your go-to list you can still mix things up with different vegetables, proteins, or a salad.
If you want more variety, try building it up to 20 meals you can rotate through. That’s a 4-week cycle if you do five of them a week. Any more is bonus!
Do I need categories?
Only if you want them. If your collection starts small, don’t worry about it. As it grows, you might want to add them like I have, to ensure a variety of proteins throughout the week.
(Note that if you use dividers to separate your categories, you’ll need to buy extra-wide dividers to see them beyond the sheet protectors.)
4 meal planning mistakes to avoid
- Planning breakfast and lunch every day. If meal planning for you means selecting three meals a day for a week, you’ll potentially have to make 21 decisions. Decision paralysis! Instead, just jot down 1-2 items each for breakfast, lunch, and snacks, and then grab five dinners from your go-to collection and you’re done. (I have a printable meal plan template you can download here.)
- Planning 7 dinners for a week. Will you cook something new every single day, realistically? For most people, 3-5 meals a week is plenty. If you shop for 7, your fridge will be overflowing and you risk wasting food.
- Being too ambitious with your planning. For me, on Saturday morning all things seem possible. So I have to be careful not to pick beautiful, elaborate meals that I won’t possibly be able to pull off later in the work week. Think about when you realistically have time to cook something new or more involved.
- Letting your go-to list get too bloated. Don’t hesitate to take something out if you’re tired of it. You can always move it back to your larger recipe collection. Once you’ve got a good go-to list, it should be meals you look forward to and can make without a fuss.
Other meal planning tips
- Try planning just 3-4 days at a time. It doesn’t have to be a whole week! It’s easier to think about just the next few days, and you’ll likely waste less food.
- Make a big batch on the weekend. Freeze it into small portions (label well!)
- Keep it simple. Tuna sandwiches can be dinner. Rotisserie chicken and salad from a bag counts. Heart-healthy food doesn’t have to be fancy. If you get your fruits & veggies, healthy proteins, whole grains, and healthy fats in without a lot of added sodium and sugar, you’re doing great.
Do you want help setting up your go-to list?
Sign up for my 6-day go-to list challenge, and in about 10-minutes a day you’ll have a go-to list started and be on your way to populating it with heart-healthy recipes.
The key is to print them out
Then you can pull the top 4-5 recipes from your binder and your meal plan is done.
So much has gone digital, and I love my big searchable recipe collection, but there’s something about being able to see those recipes on paper again, and hold them in my hand. Is it just me?
What’s your meal planning approach?
I’d love to hear about it, whether it’s a 7-day menu or a series of game-day decisions. As long as you’ve got dinner figured out before things get stressful, you’ve achieved meal planning! Gold star for you.
Chime in over on the Facebook group.
(And if you’re the smart person who told me about this trick, let me know! Sorry my memory isn’t better.)
