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Even when you’ve been meal planning for over 14 years like I have, dinner ruts are so common. Coming up with dinner ideas for every night, week after week, can be exhausting, and one of the easiest ways to burn out on planning is starting from scratch each week. Over the years, I’ve tried many methods to jump-start my meal planning: choosing one cookbook for a month, keeping a list of my family’s favorite meals, even enlisting my kids to choose a few meals each week.
No method has helped me more than “reverse” meal planning. Here’s how tracking everything we actually ate for dinner over the course of a year kept me out of dinner ruts and saved me money on groceries.
What Is My “Reverse” Meal Planning Method?
Unlike typical meal planning, where you write down what you plan to eat, reverse meal planning is the habit of writing down what you actually ate each night. It prevents dinner ruts by giving you inspiration for meal planning, but also gives greater insight on where your meal plan might have failed and helps you plan better moving forward.
You can use a journal, calendar, planner, or even your phone’s Notes app to log what you eat each night or jot down the meals once a week — including when you cook and when you order in or get your meal some other way. Then you can compare this dinner log against your meal plan for the week to see where you might need a few easier weeknight meals or when you’re most likely to order take out. Even better, once you build this habit, you’ll have a list of all the recipes you’ve already cooked and know which ones your family would happily eat again, saving you time each week when you meal plan.
How I Use My Reverse Meal Planning Method
Last year, I simply started logging our dinners each evening in a personal journal. This was an easy habit to implement as I’d often draw or journal alongside my kids as they worked on homework after dinner. I wrote down recipe names, yes, but I also wrote down when we got pizza delivery or did drive-through, too.
Two things became really clear from the dinner log: I was often overbuying ingredients for meals that weren’t realistic for weeknight, and I didn’t have pantry staples on hand for quick and easy meals that would keep me from ordering takeout. Now my meal plan includes some back-pocket meals like beef and broccoli noodles that I can cook when what I’ve planned no longer works or I’m too tired to cook but not wanting to spend on delivery or take-out.
Reverse meal planning helped me save money on groceries last year, too. Instead of buying ingredients for too many aspirational dinner ideas and sadly having a few groceries go to waste, I was able to plan more realistic meals for weeknights.
My Best Tips for Implementing a Reverse Meal Planning Method
This year, I’ve moved my meal plans and dinner log for reverse meal planning into a planner that I’m also using to track our grocery expenses. I use the weekly pages to plan our meals and then use the monthly pages to track dinner day by day. I’ve fallen off writing down our meals after dinner each night, instead updating the log every few days — meal planning shouldn’t feel like an annoying chore, so finding a rhythm that works for you is key. Keeping a week’s worth of dinner notes in my head is easy enough, but any more than that and a few calendar days end up blank!
This zoomed-out view of a past month of meals has also helped me plan buying bulk ingredients at places like Costco, stocking our freezer with staples like ground beef and chicken with a plan in mind rather than buying them “just to have.” Having my meal plans, dinner log, and grocery expenses in one place also encourages me to use up ingredients before they go to waste, saving me money week over week.
If you want to create your own dinner log so you can reverse meal-plan and fight off dinner planning fatigue, my best advice is to find a logging method that already fits into your routine. Maybe you spend a lot of time at your desk so a spreadsheet or your notes app is easiest. If you’re a paper planner, find a little spot to record meals on your calendar. Even keeping a basic notebook near the kitchen to keep note will save you from the occasional dinner rut.
