Free Printable Meal Planners
Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to deal with the hassle of figuring out what’s for dinner every night? Part of the reason that maintaining a real food lifestyle becomes difficult is because most meals are cooked from scratch. At least, if your family is on a budget making your own meals at home helps keep real food affordable. Therefore, eating real food often requires planning in advance.
That’s why I recommend weekly and even monthly meal planning. In fact, I’ve written an article about how to meal plan and why it’s important.
Today, I’m excited to share my free printable monthly and weekly meal planners with you!
Pin These Meal Planners for Later
Deciding What’s For Dinner On The Fly Is For The Birds
Oh, that pun was totally intended. Mine usually are.
Planning meals on the fly can be a drag for even the most creative cooks. In addition, planning meals the day you cook them often means you waste time and money. Meal planning once per week – or better yet, just once per month — creates an easier, time-efficient, and financially-wise way to feed your family healthy meals.
As I’ve said before, meal planning helps my family to stick to a real food diet and eat real food on a budget. When my family was new to real food I stuck closely to several easy, filling meals that I rotated.
My meal plan allowed me to space evenly throughout the month the thirty or so meals I cooked well and my family loved. My meal plan prevented repeats of the same handful of meals and helped me account for travel, meals away from home, and leftover nights.
In addition, creating a monthly meal plan allows me to take advantage of sales. I know what items I’ll need as the month goes on and if a perishable item goes on sale before I need it, I can always switch the meals around and use that item sooner than planned. That helps to keep our real food lifestyle frugal.
My Free Printable Meal Planners Make a Great Supplement To Online Meal Planner Programs
When I first started a real food diet I needed a little extra guidance for dinner ideas and meal planning. I used various online meal planners before settling on two I love.
If you need help with ideas and want an online meal planner with an app I recommend my two favorite meal planners – Real Plans and Plan To Eat. (Please read my Real Plans review. I’ll review Plan To Eat soon.)
Currently, I use a combination of Plan To Eat, recipes that I collect from Pinterest, and my printable meal planners to plan out all of my family’s meals for the entire month. This requires me to sit down once a month for about an hour and chose the meals and organize them in Plan To Eat. Then I write them on my monthly meal planner and post the menu on the wall in our kitchen so that my family always knows what’s for dinner.
Free Real Food Meal Plans
If you need help with real food dinner ideas, check out my free real food meal plans to get you started.
You can see the 14 weeks of real food meal plans individually here – Free Real Food Meal Plans
Find them all in one place on Pinterest here – Free Real Food Meal Plans on Pinterest
Other Printable Meal Planners
Hey, if you discover that my free printable meal planners aren’t exactly what you need, I encourage you to check out these lovely printable meal planners on Etsy. Just click the image to find out more about each one.
Free Printable Weekly Meal Planner and Free Printable Monthly Meal Planner
I created a free printable monthly meal planner and a free printable weekly meal planner for easy download. I kept them simple so that they would be frugal to print. Remember you can print them in black and white by changing your print settings. I hope you find them to be helpful!
Note: It seems the monthly meal planner goes outside the print margins for some folks. You can choose “fit to page” in your print settings to fix this issue.
Monthly Meal Planner July 2019Print the Monthly Meal Planner Weekly Meal Planner July 2019