Although there are many things that we Filofax lovers plan and track within our binders, there are few things that can have such a major impact in our quality of life as meal planning. For a few years now I have been dabbling with creating meal plans for myself and my husband. I have gone through periods of great meal organization, where I have had dinners planned out for the month ahead, cooked in bulk to save myself time and money and felt in total mental and physical control! I have also gone through times where I felt too busy to plan meals, wasted hundreds of dollars a month on groceries just to turn around and order take out for dinner, leaving me feeling stressed, bloated and out of control! Now, I’m not saying that meal planning is the key to all of life’s problems, but as a planner, it’s certainly an important part of our day-to-day lives that can easily be organized in such a way that we are saving money, eating better, and reducing stress on multiple levels.

Like I said, I’ve gone through the spectrum when it comes to meal planning, and I recently decided that I was going to light a fire under my butt and jump back in. Of course, now with the help of my trust Filofax, I needed a set of meal planning inserts that could help me get the job done quickly and efficiently. So, I made myself a set of meal planning inserts that I thought I would share with you now. If you are looking to get into meal planning, I hope these inserts help you get organized and on track, as they are available for sale in my Shop in both A5 and personal size. However, even if you don’t have any interest in my inserts, I hope that this post will give you some insight into meal planning using a Filofax, and inspires you to get started if that is something you believe would be helpful in your life as well!

Okay, so to start off, lets talk about the inserts that I made that are available in my Meal Planning Bundle! There are three inserts total, a Meal Master List, a Grocery List and a Weekly Meal Planner! The Meal Master List is what I consider the HQ for my meal planning process. It contains all the meals I like to make for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snacks/desserts all listed out so when I sit down to create my meal plan, I have a variety of options for meals sitting in front of me. To me, this is step one of the meal planning process because when it comes to creating a successful meal plan, having a variety of options available helps create diversity in your meal plan, so that you don’t get bored with your food options and resort to take out!

The Grocery List insert is pretty straight forward. It’s a simple checklist where you can write down all the groceries you will need for your meal plan and of course any extras you need to pick up at the store as well. Having a complete grocery list may seem like a no-brainer, but your grocery list can be a make or break for you while you are at the store. Having a complete, well thought out list helps you to prevent missing any key items you need for your meal plan, and having that list helps you to excercise your self-control, teaching you to stick to the items on your list and not stray! Although this may be tough at first, an important element to the success of any meal plan is the ability to control your groceries so that you are buying only what you need and avoiding any items that may sabotage your meal plan by creating diversions for your appetite throughout the week. Making a complete grocery list and sticking to it has helped to save me hundreds of dollars a month on my grocery bill. Why? Because when you feel confident that you have made a complete list and know that you only need to purchase the items on said list, your mind begins to turn to autopilot and you don’t get any wild and crazy last-minute ideas for extra meals or new recipes you want to try while perusing the aisles of your grocery store! So get into the habit of creating a complete and thorough list for yourself and you will see that in the end, you will save time, money and a lot of hassle!

My final meal planning insert is the Weekly Meal Planner itself, broken down into a grid format so that you can easily plan out your meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner and of course snacks, for your week! Now, I think one of the great things about using print at home meal planning inserts like these, is really that you have an unlimited supply of these sheets on hand. Although the Weekly Meal Planner is roomy, even in the personal size, there are always situations where you may need to create more than one meal plan, especially if you have a large family to plan for or special dietary restrictions you need to keep in mind for separate meals. You could also use these inserts to actually track the food that you do end up eating, if for instance you don’t stick to your meal plan but want to track exactly what you consumed, in the form of a food journal. Again, just another reason why having a printable insert is so much more of a value than purchasing pre printed inserts or using separate journals or notebooks!

So now that you know about the meal planning inserts, let me give you a brief description of how I use them and my process for meal planning! Of course, you may use your inserts differently or have your own process, but this is what I do! First of all, when I am sitting down on Sunday to organize my grocery list and create my meal plan, the first thing I do is take stock of the items I already have in the house. I compare that with my Meal Master List and decide if there are any meals I want to make for the coming week that include those ingredients. If so, I make a note of the meals on some small sticky notes or page flags and then I add any missing ingredients to my grocery list. After I have decided on meals that are already stocked (or mostly stocked) at home, I check my master list to see what else I want to eat for the week. I consult with my husband and see what he has been craving and then we pick out the rest of the meals for the week and write them out on their own sticky notes. Again, I will add any items to my grocery list that I may not have in stock for those meals. Then, I will add any other miscellaneous items I know I need to buy before heading out to the grocery store! Finally, I will take the sticky notes with each meal listed on it and map out my meal plan for the week. I do this on sticky notes because often, my husband and I will change our minds about when we want to have a meal, and that’s absolutely fine, but I need to be able to switch around my meals so that I know what I have left to make if I bump up a meal that may have been scheduled for later in the week!

That, in a nut shell, is my meal planning process. Like I said, you could do it differently to suit your needs, but this is what works for me! I love having these inserts in my Filofax, in their own dedicated section, because it helps me to keep my meal plan at the top of my mind, making it harder for me to just ignore it and order take out! I was previously using a small Sugar Paper for Target bound notebook to house my meal planning/food diary, but I found that because it was separate from my planner (that houses everything important to me and current in my life) I found it easy to forget about it, forget I had a meal plan and forget I was prioritizing this process! Now, that leads me to the final little portion of this post, which is keeping inspired to continue on with your meal planning! The final goodie that comes in my Meal Planning Bundle is a set of journaling cards that you can use in your planner or around your home to keep this process on your mind. There are four designs of journaling cards in the kit, one is a great little portable recipe card that you can keep in your planner in case you hear of a great recipe while you are out and about and want to write it down (how often have you found an interesting recipe in a magazine in a waiting room but couldn’t rip it out and take it with you? Happens to me all the time)! The second card is a hydration tracker where you can track how many glasses of water you have drunk each day in a week! I know there are a lot of folks out there who track their water or want to do a better job of tracking their water, and this little journaling card is the perfect thing to get the job done- and it fits nicely into a planner pocket or can be punched and inserted into your calendar pages so you see it frequently! Finally, the last two designs are two inspirational quotes that I think sum up meal planning perfectly! I absolutely love these cards, having punched them and inserted them into my planner as a daily reminder of my meal planning process!

Well, this was a very comprehensive blog post and I hope it gave you some good inspiration for beginning your own meal planning process with your Filofax or planner system! In case you found this post too long to read, I also filmed a video on the topic that I will go ahead and link for your convenience! If you are currently meal planning in your planner, please let me know about your system in the comments or if you would like to start, feel free to ask me any additional questions and if I can help, I certainly will! 

xoxo,