Guide to Mastering Daily Menus | Hardworkout Magazine

Key takeaways

- A daily menu is a written plan for every meal of the day, usually covering Monday to Friday, and extended to the full week when the goal is significant weight loss or competition.

- A daily menu is not a diet: you decide its contents yourself, and you can write down what to eat for each meal without calculating energy or nutrient content.

- A rotating dinner menu over five weeks, combined with a shopping list for each week, reduces food waste and makes it easier to have the right ingredients at home.

- Meal prepping suits people living alone better than families, but making a little extra for next day's lunch is a workable middle ground.

- Once a meal plan has been followed for a while it becomes automatic, and daily menus can be reintroduced whenever routines slip.

Are you one of those who constantly finds yourself in the grocery store after work, hungry and tired, sifting through shelf after shelf to figure out what to eat for dinner? Or maybe you skip breakfast and fall for the temptation to eat a cinnamon roll a couple of hours before lunch, even though it wasn't really planned? Is your fridge always empty so that you grab something convenient or order fast food when it's dinner time?

Why does healthy eating fail without a plan?

There are many traps we can fall into if we do not practice planning and preparing for a diet that aligns with our goals. Utilizing meal plans can be a step on the road to success! Many want to eat healthy and nutritious to achieve better results from their training, to gain or lose weight, and to maintain good health. Good planning is a great help to succeed!

What is a daily menu?

A daily menu is a plan for what you will eat for each meal throughout the day. It is common to have daily menus for several days at a time, such as from Monday to Friday. If the goal is to lose a significant amount of weight or to compete in a sport where diet plays a major role, the days with meal plans may apply for the entire week.


Why do daily menus make healthy eating easier?

Despite many wanting to eat healthy and nutritious, several experience that they are not quite succeeding and do not reach the goals they have set. Utilizing daily menus can make it easier to eat healthy food and establish good dietary routines. Completely fixed daily menus over a period can be beneficial for learning how much and what type of food you enjoy. This also reduces the chance of making spontaneous and unhealthy choices. Once you have followed a plan for a while, it becomes automated, and you can plan your meals without needing to write out daily menus for each day. If it slips again, you can simply return to using daily menus to get back on track.

[Read these 3 reasons to eat oatmeal every day!](https://hardworkout.no/3-grunner-til-a-spise-havregryn-hver-dag/)

How do you plan meals without counting calories?

You decide what your daily menus will consist of. It is not a diet (unless that is what you want), but a method to ensure that you eat according to your goals. As a bonus, you can save both time and money. You set up options for all of your meals throughout the day with nutritional and energy content that aligns with your goals. If you are not interested in calculating the energy and nutritional content of your daily menus, you don’t have to. If the goal is to eat regularly and healthily, it is more than enough to write down what you want to eat for each meal, without specifying the amounts of the various foods.


In practice

How do you use daily menus in everyday life?

It can be wise to adjust your daily menus based on your life situation. For families with multiple people in the household, it can be convenient to have rotating dinner menus over, for example, five weeks. This means creating an overview of each of the five weeks, where different dinners are written down for the weekdays. To avoid wasting food, you can use some of the same ingredients in several of the dinners that same week. The weekends can be left open because that is when you are more likely to have guests, go to dinner parties, or eat out. Then the dinner menus are swapped out from week to week. To take it a step further, you can write a shopping list for each dinner menu, so that you can buy everything you need for the week’s meals. Shopping for what you need for all of the week’s meals saves both time and money. Moreover, you can be sure that you have what you need at home to eat according to your goals.

[Here you can read about how to distribute calories between meals!](https://hardworkout.no/hvordan-fordele-kalorier-mellom-maltider/)

What is meal prepping, and when is it worth it?

Meal prepping, or making many portions of a dish at once, helps make it easier to have healthy and nutritious food available. It might not be so fun for the kids in the family if they have to eat the same dinner dish several days in a row. However, if you live alone, it might be perfectly fine to make a large portion of something that you can have over the next few days. It is also possible to find a middle ground and make a little extra so that you can take leftovers for lunch the next day.

How many breakfast and lunch options do you need?

You can fill out the meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner based on the rotating dinner menu. Have three to four options for these meals that you insert into your plan from week to week. At first, it may take some time and planning to write up daily menus for a week. Once you have done it a few times and experience how convenient it is to have a plan throughout the week, it becomes easier to motivate yourself to do it several times.

How do you build a five-week rotating dinner menu?

Monday: oven-baked cod with vegetables and boiled potato (boil double portion of potatoes for Tuesday's dinner)

Tuesday: dinner omelet with ham, potatoes, and salad

Wednesday: chicken fajitas with stir-fried vegetables and sour cream

Thursday: salmon fillet with potato, salad, and sour cream dressing

Friday: spaghetti with meat sauce and salad

What does a week of daily menus actually look like?

This daily menu is based on the dinner menu in the example above

Monday

What does a day of planned meals look like?

Breakfast: oatmeal with apple pieces, chopped almonds, and cinnamon, one glass of milk

Lunch: slices of bread with boiled egg, vegetables in sticks or pieces

Dinner: oven-baked cod with vegetables and boiled potato

Evening snack: crispbread with cheese and sliced vegetables, one fruit

Tuesday

Breakfast: cereal with milk and extra seeds or kernels and a sliced banana

Lunch: dinner leftovers – oven-baked cod with vegetables and boiled potato

Dinner: dinner omelet with ham, potatoes, and salad

Evening snack: skyr, low-fat kesam, or cottage cheese with fruit pieces

Wednesday

Breakfast: oatmeal with apple pieces, chopped almonds, and cinnamon, one glass of milk

Lunch: dinner leftovers – dinner omelet with ham, potatoes, and salad

Dinner: chicken fajitas with stir-fried vegetables and sour cream

Evening snack: crispbread with cheese and sliced vegetables, one fruit

Thursday

Breakfast: cereal with milk and extra seeds or nuts and a sliced banana

Lunch: dinner leftovers – chicken fajitas with stir-fried vegetables and sour cream

Dinner: salmon fillet with potatoes, salad, and sour cream dressing

Evening snack: skyr, low-fat kesam or cottage cheese with fruit pieces

Friday

Breakfast: oatmeal with apple pieces, chopped almonds, and cinnamon, one glass of milk

Lunch: dinner leftovers – salmon fillet with potatoes, salad, and sour cream dressing

Dinner: spaghetti with meat sauce and salad

Evening snack: crispbread with cheese and sliced vegetables, one fruit