Meal Planning Made Easy AF with Real Plans
Your life and goals of eating healthy, delicious, real food are both about to get a whooooole lot easier. Healthy eating, real food, and real food or paleo meal planning? Can be intimidating. But just wait and see how easy that’s going to become for you, with this amazing new service I’m about to give you guys a behind-the-scenes sneak peak about! Holy wow you guys, seriously mind blown.
Eating real food should be EASY, and delicious. But it doesn’t always seem that easy, does it?
As someone who meal plans and preps at least some ingredients or recipes pretty much every week, I know how time consuming it can be. Going through and picking recipes every week, then flipping through those recipes multiple times to make sure you get every single thing on your grocery list, braving the insanity and going to the grocery store on the weekends (or multiple, depending on if you need any specialty ingredients…and usually forgetting an item or two in the process), then trying to figure out what food you should prep at which times during the week to make getting food on the table as easy as possible? It just sounds exhausting, doesn’t it.
But it’s so necessary if you’re sticking to a certain way of eating because you have dietary restrictions, food sensitivities or allergies, or just eating to feel great, help with certain health conditions, or amp up your performance in the gym. Enter: Real Plans.
I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical at first when I heard about Real Plans, which its founders Antony and Emily call “one of the most comprehensive and powerful meal planning services right at your fingertips.” Seriously, a service that lets you pick your dietary preferences (gluten-free, vegetarian, etc.), that spits out a meal plan for however many breakfasts/lunches/dinners/snacks you need that week, that automatically makes a grocery list for you (divided by section at the store!) AND tells you which times during the week you should prep things to get meals on the table AFAP (as fast as possible)?! And if you visit multiple grocery stores, you can even make different lists for those – which are synched right to your phone on the Real Plans app. You can even take a picture of an item, so if someone else is doing your grocery shopping who doesn’t know much about ingredients…you won’t get 10 calls from them asking where to find the parsnips.
Umm, wut. Where has this been all my life?
Real Plans makes super easy, delicious weeknight dinners, quick breakfasts, afternoon snacks, and on-the-go lunches sooo much easier. And with a bunch of different awesome features like these, I’m not sure I’ll be able to go back to regular meal planning again…
Picky eaters, dietary restrictions, or cuisine cravings? If you have picky eaters in your family, don’t like certain foods, or have certain extra dietary restrictions, you can easily exclude those from your meal plan. Just go to Settings –> My Diet, and click certain foods to include vs. exclude.Kids don’t like tomatoes? Uncheck that box. You don’t like eggs or are following an autoimmune protocol? Check the AIP box. Or, go to the Recipe Box to explore your options. Craving some Mediterranean food this week? Just check that box under the Recipe Box tab!
Automatic Grocery Lists, straight to your phone! I’ve been using Real Plans for a couple months now and couldn’t be happier. Seriously, such a timesaver, I always know exactly what groceries I need (PS – there’s a cool feature where you can create separate grocery lists for different days of the week, depending on when you’re shopping, for example Monday-Wednesday and Thursday through the weekend, so you don’t have to be buying fresh produce or meat too far in advance so that it goes bad!)
Love a particular blog’s recipes? Oh AND, even cooler than that? If you have a particular blogger’s recipes that you love, you can “subscribe” to that site via real plans, and it’ll automatically populate with all that blogger’s recipes. Right now, check out recipes from: Wellness Mama, Nom Nom Paleo, The Paleo Mom, Nourished Kitchen, Autoimmune Paleo, Well Fed, Naturally Ella, Carlsbad Cravings, and Cookie + Kate, Health, Home & Happiness! I don’t have my own filter (yet!) but a bunch of my recipes are on there, and you can always import your favorite recipes from different websites super easily. How cool is that! Check this out!
The Cooking Timeline. One of the coolest features is definitely the timeline that pops out for you with the meal plan. There, it’ll show you exactly when you have to prep certain ingredients (like marinate a chicken, or make chicken broth), so you never walk into the house starving, realizing you didn’t put the pork in the slow cooker that morning (DUH).
For those indecisive folks like me who can’t decide what to eat…I also looooove the feature called Recipe Roulette, because I’m totally indecisive pretty much all the time. Don’t like one of the recipes suggested on this week’s meal plan? Click on the little spinner icon, and play recipe roulette for that dish – the site will roll you through a ton of different substitution options, and all you have to do is click on thumbs up or thumbs down to add it to your meal plan for the week (and yes, the grocery list will automatically update)!
There are about 2500+ recipes in the Real Plans database, and a handful of my own as well (more to come soon)! And as I said before, you can always import recipes from your favorite bloggers or websites too – the world is your oyster.
Want to try it out? (Um, duh). Try out Real Plans with a 30-day money back guarantee, so if you hate it (which, let’s be honest, I don’t see how you could!), you can get that $$ back. Their plan options start as low as $6 per month!
Real Food, Gluten-Free, Vegetarian, and Paleo Meal planning made easy AF, aka Real Plans just dropped the mic and left. No more wasted ingredients, no more forgetting ingredients on your grocery list when you’re already at the store and only realizing it when you get back home, time to get delicious food on the table in an even quicker and easier way for you and your family. Check out more about Real Plans here.