Planning is essential for staying organized and stress-free, especially when it comes to meal planning. Over the years, weekly meal planners have evolved from simple lists on the fridge to comprehensive notebooks and planners. This article provides a variety of free, printable diet planner templates to suit diverse needs and preferences. These templates aim to simplify your life, keep you organized, and save you money.
Introduction
Meal planning can be fun and effortless with the right tools. These free meal planner templates are professionally designed and ready to use, offering various formats, themes, styles, and colors. Whether you prefer a minimalist design or a colorful, modern pattern, you’re sure to find something that matches your style. These templates can be customized to add more sections, adjust colors and fonts, and incorporate free and premium elements from extensive graphic libraries.
Benefits of Using a Diet Planner Template
Staying Organized
Writing down your thoughts helps you remember them better, and this applies to meal planning for diet and fitness goals. A printable diet planner template helps you journal your observations and plot your results.
Saving Money
Creating planners for grocery shopping and meal prepping makes it easy to stay within budget while ensuring delicious options throughout the week. By planning meals ahead of time, you avoid impulsive purchases and reduce food waste.
Promoting Healthy Eating
Meal plans encourage you to plan meals before you are hungry, ensuring you have all the required ingredients for a healthy, home-cooked meal. This helps avoid unhealthy, ready-to-eat options. Keeping a written record of what you eat encourages healthier food choices and ensures a varied and well-balanced diet.
Read also: The Hoxsey Diet
Reducing Stress
Meal planning eliminates last-minute decisions about what to eat, making dinnertime less stressful. Knowing dinner is planned or even prepared provides peace of mind.
Types of Printable Weekly Meal Planners
Weekly Meal Planner With Grocery List
This template features a vertical orientation with days of the week on the left, including lines for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The right half provides a blank shopping list for your next grocery run. It also includes a "for the week of" section to avoid confusion.
- Features: Vertical layout, space for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, blank shopping list.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Horizontal Weekly Meal Planner With Snacks & Grocery List
This horizontal meal planner lists the days of the week on the left-hand side, with columns for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. It also includes a grocery list column on the far right-hand side.
- Features: Horizontal layout, space for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, grocery list column.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Weekly Meal Plan Template With Grocery List & Weekends
This template offers more freedom in what you write down for each day. It has a horizontal setup with a Monday start, separating weekend days from weekdays. It also includes a grocery list space on the right-hand side.
- Features: Horizontal layout, larger blank spaces for each day, separate weekend section, grocery list space.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Monday.
Weekly Meal Planner With Shopping List - Horizontal
This free horizontal menu planner features blank spaces for each day of the week and a shopping list section in the bottom right corner.
Read also: Walnut Keto Guide
- Features: Horizontal layout, blank spaces for each day, shopping list section.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Weekly Meal Planner With Blank Space
This horizontal planner has cute ribbons denoting space for each of the three main meals, with an entire bottom section left blank for notes, goals, reminders, snacks, shopping or grocery lists, or anything else that works best for your family.
- Features: Horizontal layout, space for three main meals, blank bottom section for notes.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Weekly Meal Planner With Blank Notes Section & Requests
This vertical planner has the days of the week down the left-hand side, with space for two or three meals each day. It also has a blank “notes” section and a “requests” section.
- Features: Vertical layout, space for meals, blank notes section, requests section.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Weekly Meal Planner With Blank Columns
This horizontal meal planning template has a “week of” space, all seven days, a snacks section, and two full columns for small things that need to be written down. These columns can also be used for grocery or shopping lists and even requests of family members.
- Features: Horizontal layout, space for snacks, two blank columns for notes or lists.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Weekly Meal Planner With Grocery List & Water Tracker
This vertical menu planner has all seven days on the left-hand side with enough space to jot in breakfast, lunch, and dinner options for any given day. It also lots of space in the right-hand column for next week’s grocery list and needs. Lastly, if you’re like me and try and drink a lot of water each day it has a fun little water tracker for each day that you can check off or cross out as you get all those glasses of water you need each day. Eight 8 oz. glasses of water is recommended so there are eight little glasses for your tracking!
- Features: Vertical layout, space for three meals, grocery list column, water tracker.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, light blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Weekly Meal Planner With Shopping List & Food Servings
This horizontal meal planner includes space for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for each day, a grocery shopping list section, and food servings tracking (veggies and fruits, grains, milk and alternatives, and meat and alternatives) for each day.
Read also: Weight Loss with Low-FODMAP
- Features: Horizontal layout, space for three meals, grocery shopping list, food servings tracking.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Monday.
Vertical Weekly Meal Planner With Blank Space
This vertical planner is of the minimalist variety with the seven days and space for your meals to be written and blank space at the bottom for the other miscellaneous items that need to be jotted down.
- Features: Vertical layout, space for meals, blank space for notes.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Weekly Menu Planner With Blank Space For Notes
This horizontal menu planner features the 7 days of the week down the left-hand side with enough space to write all three meals in or whatever is needed for that day. It also features a notes column on the right-hand side for a grocery or shopping list, weekly goals, reminders, love notes, requests or whatever else Mom permits. 🙂
- Features: Horizontal layout, space for three meals, notes column.
- Colors: Teal, pink, gray, green, blue, and violet.
- Start: Sunday and Monday.
Additional Tips for Effective Meal Planning
Plan Before You’re Hungry
Plan your meals before you are hungry to avoid reaching for unhealthy, ready-to-eat options.
Create a Grocery List
Make a grocery list based on your meal plan to ensure you have all the required ingredients.
Double Up Recipes
Whenever possible, double recipes and freeze the second portion for days when you don’t have time to cook.
Plan Similar Prep Meals
Plan meals that require similar prep to save time. For example, if you need to fry onions for one recipe, plan another meal that also requires fried onions the next day.
Plan Easy Meals for Busy Weeks
For weeks when you don’t have much time to cook, plan an easy weekly meal plan.
Vary Your Diet
Ensure you vary your diet for more interesting and well-balanced meals.
Check Ingredients
Before you start cooking, check that you have all the necessary ingredients.
Customizing Your Meal Planner
Using Canva
Canva allows you to customize weekly meal planner templates to match your style. You can adjust the colors and fonts, add free and premium elements, and even involve your kids in meal prepping by using colorful templates.
Editable Templates
Choose an editable meal plan template (such as in Word or Google Docs format) if you want to make changes or adapt the template to your needs.
DIY Meal Plan Maker
With the DIY meal plan maker, you can choose any free meal plan template and any background.
Digital Meal Planning
You can use any of the meal planning template PDFs on your tablet or type on them on your computer using a PDF reader.
Supplies for Printing
Printer
- For color printing, an HP Instant Ink-compatible printer is recommended.
- For black and white printing, a laser printer like the Brother L23 Series is recommended.
Paper
- For everyday printables, use Hammermill Printer Paper, 20 Lb.
- For nicer printables, use laser paper which is incredibly smooth and has very little to no ghosting on the other side.
- For printing on A5 paper, use Blank 6-Hole Punched A5 Paper.
- For binder covers, use Epson Presentation paper for fade-resistant and long-lasting results.