How To Meal Plan for 3 Months

Why Meal Plan?

Meal planning is such a crucial system to have in place.

It allows you to do so much more with your time. Even if you enjoy cooking, as I do, figuring out what to cook each night is the hard part, at least for me. Even making easy weeknight dinners for your family doesn’t really help, because you still have to plan those meals.

It’s not the cooking for most of us, it’s the planning.

This is why we meal plan.

Meal Planning Keeps Your Budget Happy

Weekly or monthly meal planning helps your budget in so many ways.

One way is you can shop sales easier. If you know what you’re cooking for the week or the month, you can buy bulk or when there’s a sale, knowing it will be all used and not wasted in your freezer or pantry.

You can also plan ahead since you know what’s coming on the menu, you know about how much money it will cost and you can budget for it. Family meal planning is a great solution for your budget!

Meal Planning Keeps you Healthy

Whether you’re on a diet or not, monthly meal planning can really help you to eat healthier.

For a lot of us, knowing what to eat that’s healthy isn’t the hard part, it’s actually doing it. When you incorporate healthy meals into your meal plan, you automatically buy the ingredients necessary to make those dishes.

Instead of standing in the store wondering what’s something healthy you can make and then settling on frozen pizza, meal planning keeps you in check. But it’s done automatically because you put the mental effort in ahead of time, you don’t have to think on the fly and you’re not tempted to make bad choices.

Meal Planning Gives You Freedom

You may not have thought about it this way, but figuring out your meals ahead of time really does free you up to do more things.

We spend so much time trying to think about supper, we use our mental resources, our time resources and then we still have to cook it!

By meal planning, you can spend the extra time outside with your kids because all you have to do is whip out your meal plan, see what you have for today, and make it. You have all the ingredients, you’ve done it all, now you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor by just walking out the plan.

It’s so freeing!

You also don’t have to worry about getting stuck at the doctor’s office late, or a meeting running over, because supper is almost ready to go. Then you’re not stressed about how late it is, snapping at your kids or husband and you can just relax about your late appointment, knowing supper is going to be OK.

You could also call your husband and tell him to make supper and all he has to do is cook whatever is on the plan. It’s so nice!

What Are the Basic Steps of Meal Planning?

Step 1: Gather Your Meal Ideas

Start by getting all of your recipes or meal ideas in order. Write them down or gather them into one place.

Step 2: Add Meals to a Calendar

Get a blank calendar or use your normal planner and write down a meal for each night for one month. Use the recipes and ideas you gathered in step one.

Step 3: Rotate Meal Plan for 3 Months

Use this monthly calendar for 3 months. That’s it! Super simple!

How To Find Recipes

Recipes and ideas can be found anywhere.

I love Pinterest for this, but you can use cookbooks, dust off that recipe box you own, or ideas from friends. I also like to ask my family what their favorite meals are.

Pinterest is by far the best tool. You can search by amount, by type of food, by health choices (low carb, low calorie), kid-friendly meals, and everything in between! I mostly use Pinterest these days for my meal planning.

Weekly Meal Planner with Grocery List

Here is a jump start to help you with meal planning!

It’s a FREE 2 week meal plan with a grocery list!

Use it to help you with Step 1 of the meal planning process or use it to help you get some breathing room in your weeks so you can implement this 3 month meal plan concept.

It can give you some weekly meal plan ideas so you can see how I’m planning myself.

It’s my gift to you! I really appreciate you being here!

Master Your Meals: 3 month Meal Planning Workshop

If you would like a more in-depth look at how to meal plan for 3 months, I offer a workshop to help you. It’s a self-paced video tutorial on how to create your own meal plan and not think about supper for 3 months!

This workshop is jam packed with goodies!

You’ll get:

• Montly meal planning template

• Printables galore! Grocey list, calendars, freezer inventory, and more!

• Video tutorials that you can watch at your own pace and on your own time.

• Ideas such as eating seasonally, how to shop sales and how to actually write the meal plan. We go through everything in depth.

• All printables are editable and can be used on the computer or tablet if you prefer.

If you would like more information, here’s the 3 month meal planning page, where you can also purchase.

Don’t need any more information and you’re ready to start?

Watch this interview I did with my friend, Kerry Klein Beck from How to Homeschool My Child. We talk about systems for your homeschool and ideas for implementing some of them. I also introduce the Master Your Meals Workshop.

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