A simple weekly meal plan template (and how to fill it in)

Most meal plan templates you'll find are pretty printables with a box for every meal of every day: 21 boxes to fill before you've had a cup of tea. That's why so many get stuck to the fridge empty.

The template below is deliberately small. It covers dinners only, and it has one column most templates miss: what else is happening that night. That column is what makes a plan survive the week.

The template

Copy this into a note, a spreadsheet or onto paper. One row per night.

Underneath, keep two short lists: Already in the fridge/freezer and Shopping list.

A filled-in example week

Here's what a realistic week looks like for a household of two adults and a child, with football on Tuesday and a late finish on Thursday.

Notice what's going on: five dinners are actually cooked, one is leftovers, one is a free night. The new recipe is on the night with the most time. The two busy nights get dinners that take 15 minutes or less.

How to fill it in, step by step

1. Fill in "What's on" first. Clubs, late shifts, nights out. This decides everything else, and it's the step people skip.
2. Check the fridge and freezer. Write down anything that needs using up. WRAP estimates that UK homes threw away 4.7 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten in 2021, so building dinners around what you already have is the easiest saving there is.
3. Put the quick dinners on busy nights. Anything under 20 minutes, a freezer meal or leftovers.
4. Plan one dinner that makes extra. Cook it early in the week and eat it again a night or two later. The Food Standards Agency advises eating leftovers within two days, or freezing them.
5. Add one new recipe, at most. On the night you have most time.
6. Fill the "To buy" column, then copy it into one shopping list. Cross off anything you already have.

For a quick balance check, look down the dinner column against the NHS Eatwell Guide: is there veg in most rows, and some variety in the proteins? A week view makes that far easier to spot than deciding one night at a time.

Tips that keep the template working

• Keep last week's plan. Next week, repeat the dinners that went down well. After a month you'll have a rotation and the template fills itself.
• Fill it in at the same time every week. Before the weekly shop, or Sunday morning. A reminder on your phone helps.
• Swap nights, don't abandon the plan. If Wednesday's dinner doesn't happen, move it to Thursday and use Thursday's freezer meal another week.

New to planning? Our beginner's guide to meal planning explains the reasoning behind each step. When you're ready to shop, see how to turn a meal plan into a shopping list.

Using DinnerSorted as your template

I make DinnerSorted, and its This Week screen is this template on your phone. Each night gets a dinner from your saved recipes, or you can build a whole week from them in one tap and then swap nights around. The grocery list is built from every recipe in the plan, with matching ingredients combined, quantities scaled to the number of people you're cooking for, and everything grouped by section of the shop.

Planning, the grocery list and Cook Mode are all free. You can add recipes by hand, or import them from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and websites, with three free imports a month and unlimited imports on DinnerSorted Pro. It's on iPhone only for now.