Mastering Meal Planning: A Comprehensive Guide to Save Money, Time, and Improve Your Health

I’ve written about meal planning before, but I’m inspired to do it again. Everyone who completes the Clarity to Action group program is invited to join an ongoing and ever-growing group in a monthly meetup. This month, I presented to the group on how I meal plan and I had so much fun creating this guide to meal planning that I wanted to share it with this broader community.

Meal planning is a fundamental system I use in my life. It has numerous benefits: planning and eating at home is more affordable than spur of the moment shopping, dining out, or takeout; it is more environmentally friendly; it’s frequently healthier because I can control exactly what I am consuming (bye-bye processed food and seed oils!); it conserves energy for other decision making; and it is time efficient.

Today, we have so many options to make accessing food more convenient. But, some of these conveniences come at a cost. While takeout or dining out can make working more and longer hours more accessible, it can deplete our bank accounts and health – two sacred resources that give us the ability to do other things.

The Bottom Line philosophy is about obtaining clarity into the choices you make and how they affect other choices. For many of my clients, the amount of money spent on food is often similar to (and sometimes more than) the amount spent on housing. I am frequently asked how to make the food budget affordable, especially with the fear of inflation causing the budget to feel even tighter. Unplanned meals cause spur of the moment decision-making which can make this category that much more expensive. Understanding ways to make eating at home simpler and more affordable can offer a chance to allocate that money and energy to other things you care about: saving for retirement, paying off debt, traveling, children’s college, or just something else fun!

Of course, sometimes it’s fun to eat out! We love go to particular restaurants, trying new ones, and especially love to explore other food cultures when we travel. The goal is to do it intentionally, so you are using your resources deliberately and not mindlessly or purely for convenience.

The Guide provides a step-by-step process for meal planning. It will help you figure out how to plan meals to eat for the entire week, even if some of those meals are planned dining out meals, and it will also help you avoid those last minute -out meals or trips to the store that really eat into the budget (pun intended!).