How to Meal Plan for Weight Loss
This can be one of THE biggest struggles we have in my household. Doing this right can make or break our week. When we plan, our meals are set and all we have to do is make them. On the other hand, if we forget to plan, we find ourselves scrambling.
If you’re not meal planning already, you may be here because you realize that making game-time decisions on what to eat each day is a quick path to failure.
Life gets busy when you’re running around with kids and taking the time to plan your meals for a week or more can feel like a huge burden. But if you don’t take the time to do it, you’ll waste more time later trying to decide what to eat, making extra trips to the store, or worse, ordering carryout when you know you shouldn’t be.
There are ways to make meal planning easier and more effective. We’ll show you how.
What is Meal Planning?
Let’s start with an understanding of what meal planning is and why it is so important.
Your initial thought might be that meal planning is just writing some meals on paper (or on your phone). And you’d be right. However, it’s about what this process does for you instead of the process itself.
Writing down what meals you plan to have and when helps you in a few ways:
- You batch your decisions about what you’re going to eat saving time and effort
- Creating a grocery store list becomes much easier so you minimize trips
- Even after a long day, you’ll be much more likely to stick to your plan if you already have everything you need
- You might even find yourself stretching into meal prepping, which is another great tool for helping you lose weight.
Planning your meals is a win-win for you and your journey to lose weight. But is there a better way to plan?
Before You Start…
Keep It Simple
If you eat three meals a day plus a couple of snacks you might think that you have 35 or so meals to plan for a seven-day week. One important thing to avoid in your meal planning and weight loss journey is complexity.
Not every meal needs to be special or unique. Variety might be the spice of life, but it’s not going to help you lose weight. If you find yourself trying to plan for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks you’re doing lots of things wrong.
Ultimately, you want most of your meals to be the same each day. I personally eat the same breakfast, lunch, and snacks every day. I have found foods and ways to prepare them that I find enjoyable and that fit within my dietary needs
When we meal plan, we’re really only planning for dinners. You go from planning 35ish meals to only seven, at most, in a given week.
Know Your Numbers
In line with keeping it simple, it’s important to know your numbers. Specifically, what your targets are for calories and protein. If you know these, meal planning is much easier.
Always plan your protein first. Try to get between 30 – 40 grams of protein per meal. When I get to dinner, I know I need about 30 grams of protein and I can have it any way I want: chicken, ribeye, burger, pork, or some other combination. I can do this because the rest of my day is nailed down and I don’t even have to think about it.
Once you know how to keep it simple, you’ll have 90 percent of your meal planning done. The last 10 percent is just a simple plug of protein and calories to meet your goal.
Use the right tools the right way
Nothing will help you learn the nutritional information of the foods you eat better than a calorie tracker. Using a calorie tracker is also the best tool to help you with your meal plan.
When you start out, you probably don’t know, off hand, how many calories are in a serving of chicken or rice or what the protein content is. A calorie tracker will tell you everything you need to know. As you get into a groove and find your favorite meals, you’ll need to track calories less and less.
For me, I’ve been happy with the free version of myfitnesspal, but you can use whatever you like.
Consider your lifestyle
Before you get too far into meal planning, think about your lifestyle and what types of foods and meals will work best.
As an example, if you work from home a lot, you may have more flexibility and time to make meals than someone who is on the road. For someone who is on the road, meals may need to be made ahead of time (meal prepping) or grab and go.
Make sure you take a moment to think about the foods and meals that will give you an advantage and not make your journey more difficult.
If you’re just starting your weight loss journey and want to save time and skip the learning curve, grab a free meal plan here to get you started!
Meal Planning Tips & Tricks
Below are some things we can do to make our lives easier while meal planning.
Get a head start
Going back to the Keep It Simple concept, meal planning doesn’t require you to break out the cookbook. Most of us have meals that we cycle through.
You can give yourself a head start by starting with the meals you already eat. To make them fit your needs, you may need to modify them a bit, but you’ll be way ahead of the game compared to starting from scratch.
Again, you’ll find the most success by being consistent. It’s fine to throw in a new meal or recipe every so often, but it doesn’t need to be a daily or weekly thing.
Stock up
Now that you know what meals you like and will cycle through most, you can stock up on some of the essentials. Dry goods have long shelf lives so get things like rice and spices and have them on hand.
Frozen items are also easy to stock up on if you have the freezer space. We buy meat in bulk, frozen vegetables, and frozen fruits to have on hand.
When you stock up like this, your meal plan starts with what you have in stock! After a busy weekend, it’s nice to have at least a couple of meals you can just pull out of your pantry to get your new week started.
Make it easy
Don’t burn yourself out always trying to find and prepare unique meals. We’re all busy and planning simple meals will help you stay on track. If you have a night where you won’t have as much time to prepare a meal, you can do one of two things:
- Plan your easiest meals for these nights, or
- Plan some meals so that you can have them multiple nights.
It’s easy to get sucked into looking up fancy meals, but use these sparingly and save them for weekends when you might have more time.
If you do have some extra time, you can do some small-scale meal prepping for those nights you know you won’t have it. Some meals are easy to double and some recipes tend to make extra.
Have a backup plan
There will always be a night when nothing is going your way. There are a few key things you can try to always have on hand to get you through the hardest days. Here’s what I like to keep around:
- Canned tuna
- Canned chicken
- Frozen or canned vegetables
- Instant rice
- Favorite sauces
With these ingredients, you can throw together a good meal without any effort and stay on track. If you’re in a pinch, throw some canned chicken in a bowl with instant rice, add some sauce, and eat. It doesn’t have to be complicated to be delicious and easy.
Meal Planning Tips & Tricks
Pulling It All Together
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” – Warren Buffett
Meal planning can feel like a dreadful exercise, but it’s one of the most important things you can do to help yourself lose weight. Without it, you’ll constantly be put in situations where you’re more likely to make bad decisions.
Meal planning doesn’t have to be hard. If you follow this guide, you only need to plan for a handful of meals and they’re probably very familiar to you already. No need to research a bunch of new recipes.
The most important thing is to have a plan and to stick to it consistently. You can lose a lot of weight with good meal planning and consistency.