How Extreme Meal Planning Can Reduce Your Daily Stress Extremely
“It’s amazing how much of family life is just figuring out how to get dinner on the table every night at 6 pm,” a very senior professional friend of mine said to me several years ago.
During the pandemic, a lot of daily-life decisions fell to me as my partner’s healthcare work become even more stressful and even more off-site. For some reason, deciding what’s for dinner especially seemed to be taking a lot of time and effort to execute, and it was making me even more tired and irritable than I needed to be. Finally, because decision fatigue is real, I decided 2020 was the year I was going to minimize decision fatigue, following the advice I saw to “decide once” about dinner, period.
After I got to my own extreme meal plan (thirteen weeks of unique meals) through trial and error, friends started asking me about how to do it to reduce their own decision fatigue. I kept forwarding the same email, so I’ve turned that long email into this shareable medium article to help as many people as possible. Enjoy and good luck!
Step 1: Assign a Protein to Each Day of the Week
I think that the magical effectiveness of this process rests on the structure of a consistent protein or meal format selection per weekday, which is our first step.
You probably have one or more patterns in your family. Some families always have pasta with bolognese on Sunday nights. Others, like mine, have chicken on Friday nights. Yet other families are vegan and have tofu, seitan, and other alternative proteins that aren’t necessarily assigned to one particular day of the week yet. Go with your various needs, not mine.
When I made the first short rotation in September 2020, beef was on Sundays, for example. Monday was fish, Tuesday was vegetarian, Wednesday was an entree soup or salad with whatever protein I had on hand, Thursday was leftovers/freezer, Friday was chicken, and Saturday was pasta or pizza.
Some of those nights aren’t proteins per se but meal formats that allowed me to use up protein leftovers, so it’s not hard-and-fast demand to allocate proteins only.
Step 2: Create a One-Week Meal Plan to Match Your Protein Selection
Here, assign a specific recipe (ideally with a link) to one night of the week according to your protein selection.
For example, if you have chicken for dinner on Friday nights, choose a specific chicken recipe to put in the box. Rather than just saying “chicken” or “Italian chicken” or “barbecue chicken,” select a specific recipe like “Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic,” which is a personal favorite of mine.
Leftover night: Whatever else you choose, I recommend having a night called leftovers/freezer so that you can go through your storage of food and reduce waste to the extent possible.
Budget: Some proteins are more expensive than other proteins (lamb is more expensive than chicken, say). Some methods of food preparation are more expensive than others (I’m looking at you, friends with home sous vide machines). Some means of food storage are more expensive than others; not everyone has a pantry freezer they can use to store extras. This system can flex to whatever budget you’re dealing with, almost to an extreme. One night can be black beans, another lentils, and so on.
Step 3: Brainstorm about Additional Meal Ideas Until You Get to Another Week of Planned Meals
If you’ve been cooking for yourself or others for any amount of time, you probably have more than one chicken or pasta recipe that you like.
This is the fun part, at least as far as I’m concerned. In another place online or offline, keep track of meal ideas you have until you fill up another row. Go to a restaurant and love the paneer tikka masala? Add it under “dairy” or “vegetarian” night, say.
Step 4: Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until You Get to the Right Number of Weeks for Your Family
I have one friend who uses a one-week meal rotation. Most friends who share this process seem to repeat until they get to four weeks of meal rotation on average. Some go to eight.
Because I like a lot of variety (and am seeking to avoid boredom that would lead me to stop using the system), I went to a thirteen-week meal rotation. It’s a calendar quarter, so I repeat my rotation four times per calendar year. Also, cookbooks (and, obviously, the NYT Cooking section) are my pleasure reading, so I love finding new recipes to add to my roster. I realize that thirteen weeks is “extreme,” but hey, I advertised it honestly as extreme in the title!
Balance: As you add in new weeks, you may want to move some meals around for balance. For example, when I went from four to eight weeks, I noticed I had one week that had four nights of Vietnamese and Thai food while another week had a lot of Italian recipes. I switched a couple around in order to create a nice balance.
Visibility: I have printed out this meal plan and posted it in my kitchen. I also printed and laminated a smaller version for use at the grocery store. My kids like to look at the menu and see what’s coming for dinner so they can complain bitterly about it as soon as possible. Just kidding. Mostly. I write edits on the paper copy in the kitchen for the next go-round thirteen weeks later. Oh, and if you’re overloaded like I am, you may also benefit from marking the day of the week next to the Sundays. For example, I’m on week 12 now, so the date for this past Sunday is hand penciled next to the week 12 Sunday.
Health: I have an unscientific sense that more variety means more food consumption means more weight gain. Please be careful to gain only the weight you wish to gain and no more or less.
Refine as Needed for Special Considerations
This plan isn’t intended to be a prison, just a default meal idea so that you don’t have to make a daily decision if you don’t want to. And you’ll make mistakes, which you’ll edit on your plan as you go.
- Spontaneity: We absolutely do not follow this plan every day. Sometimes I’ll find something interesting looking at the store and be inspired to make something else. Occasionally, we’ll order in. Still other times, we’ll be invited to friends’ or family’s houses, but not often because I have four loud kids. :) On those nights, we… just don’t follow the plan. We use food storage to minimize waste on those nights and catch up on leftover night.
- Changes in diet: After a few cycles through my rotation, one of my children decided to explore a vegan diet. After five rotations, I decided I didn’t want to use red meat any more, so I replaced that whole day of the week with turkey. My next big replacement will be to remove pizza/pasta night. Your replacements should be handled one meal at a time, one protein/day at a time, or at whatever rate you want.
- Removal of unpopular meals: Not every meal is appreciated equally, shall we say. I cross off a meal if a majority of eaters dislike it intensely, and you can use whatever threshold you feel is appropriate for your family.
- Seasonality: I don’t include side dishes in my plan so that I can see what’s available seasonally at the store. Still, some dishes are more evocative of cold-weather food while others are lighter fare I prefer in the “soupy” Houston summers. If you live in a place with distinctive, predictable seasons, you might create two four-week menus: one for cold weather and one for warm weather.
- Waste: I am sensitive to the fact that we throw away a lot of food as a society. An Extreme Meal Plan helps me avoid purchases that get thrown away because no one wants what I got, etc.
- Bonus TimeSaver — Make a Cookbook: To save even more time, I printed a copy of oft-used recipes and put them into a binder I keep by the printout of the meal plan. Printing isn’t great, but neither is repeat Googling and time wasting online. So I have a big binder called Musher Family Recipes and they’re labeled in pencil according to the day on the meal plan when I use them. For example, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Black Pepper Tofu (shockingly good) says “T8” on it for week 8’s Tuesday recipe. And the recipes are listed in order for quick reference, because that’s just more decision making (which black pepper tofu recipe do I want to use this time?) and time wasteage (Where’s that recipe again?) and cell-phone time (looking at the recipe) I can avoid.
- Bonus TimeSaver — School Lunches: I made a simple, one-week meal rotation for school lunches that I pack for my kids, too. Another great decision fatigue reducer, and my kids tolerate a one-week rotation pretty well.
Please comment if you have ideas for further improvement of this process. And here’s a downloadable spreadsheet you can use for your own Extreme Meal Planning pleasure. Good luck!