Weekly Meal Planner {Freebie}

One of my goals for this new year is to create healthy habits.  One habit in particular that I first want to focus on is healthy meal planning and food prepping on a weekly basis.  

I typically go grocery shopping every week. I have a general list of key foods and ingredients that we typically restock weekly; fresh fruits and vegetables, two to three different types of meats or fish, and of course the eggs, milk, and bread.

I spend a long time in the supermarket. I walk up and down a lot of the aisles checking for sales or items that I might have missed or needed to restock at home. Because of this, I usually end up with way more than I had originally intended on buying.  A lot of this “extra food” ends up wasted because it went bad before we even got a chance to eat it. 

While I’m only on week three so far, the meal planning is already helping to solve these problems.  Now when I got to the supermarket, I have a list of exactly what I need to buy for the meals that I plan to make that week.  This means I spend a lot less time walking around aimlessly, have less food waste at the end of the week, save money since I’m not splurging on impulse buys, and can plan out well balanced healthy meals for my family and me to eat on a regular basis.  

Additionally, the meal planning has already really helped me stick to my goal nourishing my body with more wholesome and healthy meals.  Before I meal planned, I would basically look in the fridge right around dinner time  to see what we had and try come up with a quick meal on the spot.  Sometimes this meant we ate the same thing over and over each week because it was easily and I always had the ingredients.  Other times, it meant I was too lazy to think about what to make for dinner, so I pulled out some frozen food from the freezer to heat up in the microwave and let the fresh ingredients in the fridge go to waste.  

I’m sharing the weekly meal planner I currently use with you today so that it can potentially help you in the same way it helped me.  The great thing about this meal planner is that you can either download and print it and write on it like any other standard template, or rather you can edit it on the computer instead and type out your meals before you print! 

I love having the ability to edit and type out my meals, rather than filling them in by hand.  First of all, I think it just makes the weekly menu look so much cleaner and easier to read.  Secondly, you can copy and paste! No need to rewrite the same thing over seven days in a row if you know you always eat the same breakfast, like I do.  Again, another great way to save valuable time! 

In order to edit this PDF, you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.  If you don’t already have it, don’t worry, Adobe offers it’s for free! You can download it HERE. 

Once you have Adobe open, open the Weekly Meal Planner and you will see the text fields in which you can edit.  If you’d like to change any of the font features (colors, style, size, etc.), select “command + e” on a Mac or “control + e” on a PC. 

*Please note, if using a Mac, the file may automatically open in Preview.  I recommend using Adobe Acrobat instead as you might not be able to save and/or format your planner appropriately in Preview.

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