Hi Reader,

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the tension between wanting to eat intuitively and still needing to plan ahead.

I was working with a client who’d bought ingredients for the meals she planned at the start of the week, and by mid-week, she wasn’t really feeling any of them. She wanted to eat what sounded good, but the produce was sitting in the fridge and she felt like she had to use it. She wasn’t sure if honoring that felt more like being practical, or like following a rule.

It’s a good question. And I think the answer (like most areas of food and nutrition) lives somewhere in the gray.

Eating intuitively doesn’t mean every meal has to be spontaneous. You can plan ahead, stock the fridge, have a loose sense of the week, and still be eating intuitively. And it also doesn’t mean you always have to follow the plan. If you bought kale for a grain bowl and by Thursday you really want pasta, you can make the pasta. The kale will still be there on Friday.

What tends to make meal planning feel like a diet is the rigidity, the specific meal assigned to each specific day, the sense that deviating from the plan means you did something wrong.

The shift I keep coming back to is from planning meals to building a foundation for consistent eating. Having food in the house. Knowing roughly what the week looks like. Prepping a few components so that making something doesn’t feel like starting from scratch. And giving yourself full permission to want something different than what you planned.

I wrote about all of this in a new post, including a real example of what a flexible week of dinners actually looks like when things go as planned and when they don’t.

​Read: How to Meal Plan with Intuitive Eating​

I'd love to hear about your experience with meal planning. Hit reply and tell me: are you a plan-ahead person, a figure-it-out-as-you-go person, or somewhere in between?

Warmly,

Stephanie

Hi, I'm Stephanie

I'm a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor. I help people stop fighting food and build a way of eating that feels steady and satisfying, with plant-forward recipes and one-on-one support.

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Find me on Instagram for recipes and real talk about food freedom, and on Pinterest for more plant-forward inspiration.