100 meal ideas for easier meal planning

This is an easy-to-use list of 100 meal ideas to provide meal planning inspiration to your clients.  You can send clients home with this resource or use it as a guide during your counseling sessions or group classes.  This list of 100 meal ideas is there to answer the question: “What’s for Dinner?”.

Use this list:

• for endless meal inspiration
• to select meals for a night, a week, or even a full month
• to come up with meal ideas, then clients search online for a specific recipe with instructions
• to quickly skim for reminders of meals of favorite meals
• for ideas on how to use the ingredients a client has on hand
• to help plan grocery shopping
• as a discussion tool to work through dietary modifications a client needs to make to typical meals (avoiding gluten, increasing fiber, decreasing sodium, etc).
• as a worksheet to select meal ideas and come up with additional meals
• to boost client’s confidence with meal planning
• to add new ideas to household meal planning
• to add meal variety for meal planning interest
• and to improve meal planning skills!

A section on “quick tips for nutritious meals and easy meal planning” is also included to guide in healthy meal planning skill building, as well as a section on “how to use this list of meal ideas” to encourage your clients to get the most from this resource.  These two sections allow this easy-to-use resource to be useful even in a health fair setting or situation when counseling can’t be provided directly with this list.  Both of these sections include a mention of working with “your dietitian” to discuss foods to best meet your nutritional needs, this refers clients back to you, the expert.

This list does not include recipes, ingredients, or cooking instructions.  This is a list of 100 general, and varied meal suggestions used for meal inspiration for clients to then find recipes online with their specific preferences.  It includes a variety of meal prep methods to appeal to all clients (those with plenty of time for kitchen tasks and those with very limited time for meal prep).  This list includes a variety of proteins and some culturally diverse suggestions, it is not a list customized for any specific dietary restrictions but can provide the meal examples to help you work with clients on how to modify foods for specific dietary needs or desired changes.  

Meal Planning – Recommended Tools

Explore these and other helpful meal planning resources in my Well Resourced Dietitian store HERE.