If You Think Meal Planning Isn’t for You
A simpler way to make dinner easier
I meal plan.
It was something I started years ago as a way to actually use my growing cookbook collection (I might have a small problem!)
I would come home after work, flick through the cookbooks looking for something to make for dinner, realise I had neither the time nor the ingredients required for most of the recipes, then make pasta. Again.
So I started planning the week’s meals. I bought the ingredients I needed. I knew how long something would take to make. Suddenly we were eating a more varied diet and I was finally using those cookbooks.
What I didn’t realise until slightly later is that I had also made my life significantly easier. I could come home and cook. I didn’t have to waste time wondering what to cook. I didn’t spend the day thinking about dinner. I just followed my plan. Mostly.
Over 25 years later, I still meal plan. Because the benefits of doing so haven’t changed. I know what to buy, I know what to cook, and it reduces the decision fatigue that tends to build by the end of the day.
And yet, when I talk about my love of meal planning, I can often see the look:
“Well that’s great for you. But that’s not for me.”
The Meal Planning Stereotype
I think when people hear the words “meal planning” they picture something structured and intentional. Something that possibly involves a spreadsheet.
You might imagine a full week mapped out in advance, every dinner assigned to a specific day. A neatly itemised list of ingredients. Nothing left to chance.
It can feel like something that requires a certain type of personality. Someone who genuinely enjoys planning ahead. Someone who has the mental space to think about next Thursday’s dinner on a Sunday.
It feels rigid. Like you’re locking your future self into decisions you might not want to keep.
And if that’s what you think meal planning is, I understand why you might think, “That’s not really me.”
That version does exist.
But it’s not the only version.
What Meal Planning Actually Is
Meal planning is deciding ahead of time what you’re going to cook, so that you don’t have to make that decision at 5pm. Every night.
That’s really all it is.
It’s not about being ultra-organised. It’s about moving decisions to a time when your brain has more space to work things out.
The idea behind planning is that you only choose once, not every evening. By doing this you reduce the small, repetitive decisions that tend to feel heavier at the end of the day.
Planning doesn’t remove flexibility. Life will intervene during the week. Stuff happens. The plan isn’t a rigid contract. It’s there to reduce decisions when things go roughly to plan.
It’s about deciding, not pre-cooking. That’s a different conversation.
At its core, meal planning is simply a way of making dinner easier before dinner arrives.
What It Isn’t
It isn’t cooking everything on Sunday.
That’s meal prep. And while that works well for some people, it’s not a requirement here. Planning is about deciding what you’ll cook, not cooking it all in advance.
It isn’t assigning meals to exact days.
You can, if that helps (I do). But you don’t have to. A list of meals for the week, used in whatever order suits you, is still a plan.
It isn’t a rigid script.
Life changes. You get home late. Someone (usually the cook) doesn’t feel like chilli. The plan is a guide, not a contract.
It isn’t about getting it perfect.
You will overestimate your energy some weeks. You’ll forget to defrost something. You’ll pivot. That doesn’t mean the planning failed.
It isn’t cooking something new every night.
Sometimes the plan is simply “stir-fry”, “pasta”, or “leftovers”. Familiar food counts.
What This Might Look Like in Real Life
Meal planning doesn’t have to look impressive to work.
It might just be writing down a few dinners for the week and working through them in whatever order makes sense at the time.
It might be buying chicken, mince and/or some vegetables, with a rough plan for how they’ll turn into dinner.
It might be deciding that one night will be leftovers so you have one less meal decision to make.
It might be realising you’re going to be late home on Thursday and planning something that will be quick to make that night.
It might be making sure there’s something easy in the freezer for the night everything falls apart.
All of this is still planning.
It’s not elaborate. It’s just thinking a little bit ahead so dinner doesn’t land on you all at once.
Why This Matters
Without any planning, you get to 5pm and have to figure out what dinner is from whatever happens to be in the house.
You open the fridge. You look in the pantry. You flick through cookbooks or search online. You start mentally assembling possibilities.
Sometimes dinner will come together easily. Sometimes you default to the same thing because it’s quicker than thinking.
Sometimes you realise you’re missing one ingredient that would have made the whole process straightforward.
Planning changes that starting point.
You’ve bought the ingredients because you’ve already decided what they were for. That means you can walk into the kitchen already knowing what you’re making.
And that small change makes the whole exercise feel lighter.
A Simple Place to Start
If “meal planning” still feels like a lot, like something that won’t fit either your life or your brain, don’t start with the whole week.
Start small.
Pick a couple of dinners you know you can cook without much thought. Write them down somewhere. Buy what you need to make those meals.
You don’t have to assign them to specific days. You don’t have to prep anything in advance.
Just notice what happens on the nights when you’ve already made the decisions. Notice how you feel.
If it makes life easier, keep doing it.
If it doesn’t, you’ve lost nothing.
Let me know how it goes.
On open weeks, I plan a few meals and leave space for leftovers. If it’s a busy week, I plan accordingly, choosing meals that intentionally create leftovers for the nights when time is shortest.