How do you plan out your meals for the week/meal prep?

Great question! We do meal planning every weekend for the entire week. Even after doing this for many years, I still scratch my head each time and wonder what I am going to feel like making that week.

Something that has helped a lot though, is that whenever I encounter or make a recipe that I particularly like, I log it in my personal 'cookbook'. This is actually just an online document where I can add pictures, ingredients (for my grocery list) and instructions if I feel like it. Over time, this list has grown to about 100 recipes which I know how to make and know taste good. I often browse through this list for inspiration when making my meal prep plan. I still use this list a lot, but as I am getting older and less patient I also use a recipe app with a built-in browser that can extract all this information automatically from an online recipe with some AI algorithm to avoid the manual work.

On your question about forming a habit, in my experience it is important to select recipes based on your mood. I try to maintain a large variety of recipes, from multi-hour cooking adventures like moussaka to simple and down-to-earth things like a grilled cheese sandwich. There will be days that the latter is all you can realistically manage, but at least you made the effort to make it yourself and it will be much cheaper than eating out.

One last thing: life is busy and being forced to cook every day is exhausting. I try to only cook every other day or so, making a double batch (when a recipe allows for it) and refrigerating or freezing the leftovers for another day. Investing in some good storage containers really helps here.

Between work and kids, I've fallen into a system that requires almost no upfront planning week-to-week. I have a set of common "formats", a set of simple preparations, and a set of core flexible ingredients. These can be mixed and matched on the fly and all come out reasonably well. Formats are like protein + carb + veg, pasta + [something] sauce, rice + topping, assorted stuff in pita or taco, etc. Simple preps are like cubed + roasted, stir-fried/sauteed, steamed, baked. Ingredients are like chicken breast, salmon, tofu, minced beef/pork, onion, garlic, beans, etc. Also a small selection of versatile shelf-stable seasonings (this can be built up over time - avoid specialty/single-purpose things). Stock your freezer and pantry with this in mind. Weekly grocery shopping will become simply replenishing the stock and grabbing whatever fresh veg is in season. You'd be amazed how many combinations you can make from those and how easy it is to decide/swap on the fly based on how you're feeling and how much time you've got to make it. Tools like rice cookers and slow cookers and pressure cookers can open up even more possibilities with the same ingredients with very little active effort or planning.

Weekends can be handled the same way until you come across a recipe or ingredient that actually inspires you to spend the time.

I struggled a lot with meal planning until I identified the root cause of the issue for me: unless you really love cooking and have lots of time, meal planning to spice up the week is just too cumbersome. Meal prepping is supposed to be boring, but reliable.

What I mean is that meal planning, as a whole, is meant to turn your meals into sort of a factory assembly line. The goal is to simplify your planning, to make it easily replicable and efficient.

Before that I was always trying to vary the dishes because I saw this or that meal prep dish online, but this just doesn't work in practice because meal planning really wants to lean on a systematic set of pieces, aka ingredients. So when I tried to use new recipes, even if I liked them a lot, I would often end up with lots of single use foods that were hard to incorporate into the system, which in turn made me frustrated with the process as a whole.

Variance also added a lot of stress to me, personally. Now on top of having to cook several meals, I had to worry about whether or not they'd come out well and if my family would like them. This is just not what I need when I'm trying to plan meals for the week.

Lastly, I was always doing a lot of the boring prepping every week, stuff like slicing onions, chopping garlic, etc. Which adds up when you have lots of meals to do and made me feel burnt out.

So, in the end, because I really need structure to not be stressed out of my mind, I boiled my meal planning down such that:

• The golden rule: all recipes must be tried and tested for battle. No adding new recipes or changing up existing recipes until you are sure you can easily make them and they don't stress you out. I remember reading this in a manga somewhere and it really resonated with me: the best recipes are the ones that you know you can cook when you're at your lowest. Sticking to this rule really changed my relationship with meal prepping because, as it turns out, I feel quite low a lot of the time.
• Taking the above into account, I now only have a few recipes to choose from. I initially wrote 10 recipes in a Google doc I believe, but this number can change into whatever you feel comfortable with, even just 3 is fine. The goal is to have a small list always ready and so that I can easily point to 1 and go with it. It eliminates choice paralysis.
• No more prepping most of the food on the same day I'm cooking it. I now always have a day for slicing and dicing all the stuff I need and a separate day to actually cook all of it. This reduces the time spent per day immensely, and in turn the exhaustion I feel. Ideally this applies to all ingredients, but if you're going to include an ingredient that needs to be prepped the day of, be sure to keep it to a minimum and know that you can easily prep it.
• Related to the above: the freezer is now my best friend. I made a list of all the common prep ingredients I need and always keep a bunch of that in the freezer pre-pepared to save myself time. For example, I chopped up like 10 heads of garlic and stuffed them in a freezer bag. I have not worried about needing chopped garlic for months. And if this is too much work still, just buy it frozen already. I don't do that because it's more expensive, but it's absolutely the same end result in practice.
• If the recipe needs a sauce, especially sauces that take long to make like a good tomato sauce, make more of the sauce and freeze the extra for later use. If I'm going to spend 2+ hours making a sauce, I'm going to make a ton of that sauce.
• There are always shared ingredients between at least a few of the recipes. This is to avoid the problem of single use spices, sauces, vegetables, etc. Either that or whatever ingredients I know will be leftover I can use in some way.
• Make soups. Soups are absolutely incredible to use up your vegetables, including your leftover ones. You don't even really need a specific soup recipe, just throwing the vegetables you have into a pan will more often than not yield good results and you always get a massive batch out of them. It's millenia old food that never misses and is very filling and healthy. Plus they're super hands off to make. Seriously I can not stress how amazing soups are, especially if you don't enjoy raw salads much like me.
• Since you say you scroll tiktok for recipes a lot, something I did but on YouTube and went through the same struggles with, I will also add that you really need to stop that habit. Or at the very least reframe it so that you don't constantly feel the urge to try new recipes. You are not a tiktoker trying to make an eye-popping fancy meal. Experimentation is not for meal prepping. If you want a new recipe from a video, first make sure it actually fits into your meal prepping structure, then try to cook a small portion of it and see if you and/or the people you're cooking it for like it, and then, only when you're sure you can reliably make that meal (ie. When you're feeling like crap, can you cook that meal?), will it go on your rotation. If the recipe doesn't fit the criteria for meal prepping but you still like it a lot, just add it to a normal recipe book and cook a small portion of it occasionally instead. Not every recipe needs to be for meal prepping, and that's okay.
• Remember that tiktokers make food and recipes for a living, they like what they do and they made it a hobby/job, so they can get away with more intricate dishes and more involvement, whether it is because they just really like it or they have the time to practice those dishes a lot. You are not a tiktoker with lots of free time and attention to do this, so you need to take a step back and build your own routine that fits your circumstances. That's the key to not stressing yourself out, focusing on yourself and what you can do.

After implementing these changes and making a Google doc with all the recipes that fit in them, I now just ask my family what they want from the list this week. If no one can decide I just roll a d20, since I have less than 20 recipes.

I really thought when I started this that I would get bored of my food, but as it turns out, during stressful weeks I'm less so worried about how amazing my dishes will taste and more so whether or not I have a dish at all in the first place. Thus, having a systematic way to reliable put food on my plate is going to make me feel happy and satiated 99% of the time. Once that really clicked, I stopped fussing over how to improve my meal prepping and focused on just having a simple but always reliable system that doesn't need updates every other week.

I hope this helps. I'm sure I'm not saying anything groundbreaking but to me it was groundbreaking because, up until then, I was constantly watching videos of meal peppers and other recipes and being annoyed that, while I tended to like them all, I never stuck to making them regularly. Now, I don't even think much about it because I know I can just look at my pre-made list and decide what my week will be like with a d20.

I have a rss reader with food blogs that I read.
When I see a recipe I like it goes into my copymethat app.
On Sunday I go through the recipes and put what I want to make into the app meal plan.

I sort of meal plan but I never do stuff in advance. I am very much a 'I want to shop every day' person. I don't freeze anything, either... so not a lot of use.

What I like to do is skim BA for some ideas. If that doesn't produce anything of value, I like /r/finedining. Not that I'll be making any of the fancy shit, but I usually get some good ideas.

If you're prepping in advance, the most important thing you can get is a tape dispenser and good containers for storing your mise. There's nothing worse than heading out thinking you have a bunch of ______ only to find that its gone bad. names and dates on everything.

This recipe is boss for spaghetti. I make it almost every week and its super easy and cheap. That salad is also really great and acts as a great base.

For dinners, we have a list of regular meals on our fridge door, in total currently about 80 of them that we rotate. They are divided into sections (meaty, fishy, vegetably).

The lists are written on magnetic fridge pads that allow easy erasing. Each item has a checkbox next to it. Once a week on the shopping day morning, we put check marks on the meals that we plan to cook during the next week, as we write down the shopping list. We aim to have two from each column, and then a third one from the veggies section. Checkmarks can't repeat from one week to another.

During the week, we know our "menu" and can pick whatever we feel like eating from the list on that day. But all dinners need to be cooked. Some dinners are planned for two days so that there is less cooking. Sometimes we make bigger batches (of casseroles, meatballs, falafels and such) and freeze things for future weeks.

As for lunches, we make salads, hummus, boiled eggs and such in the mornings. So, when shopping, we make sure that we have ingredients for those, including proteins like tuna, cheeses, eggs, beans and such. Some, like hummus, we make for two or three days in a row.

We also chop fruits into little boxes to remember to eat a variety of fruits every day. We tend to prepare those for three days at a time.

This may sound a lot, but it actually saves time and energy for us, as it works quite efficiently. For instance, since everything is kind of pre-planned, we can throw a lunch together while waiting for the morning coffee to brew.

A very boring diet. Eating the same thing throughout the week and eating variations of the same thing every week.

I’ve been recently buying whole young chickens and making them with a vegetable and a potato. And just eat that for lunch and dinner. I’m just one person though.

So my ADHD makes it difficult to cook for myself all the time, so my go-to has always been meal prep with as little work as possible, and also have something that doesn't go bad if I forget to eat it. Also something that takes as little effort as possible to cook for when my executive function is acting up.

What I've found works for me is using the "Souper Cube" system. So Souper Cubes are basically big silicone ice trays with measurements. You're supposed to freeze soup into cubes and re-heat, but I don't just use them for soup. I also bought off-brand ones on Amazon because they're cheaper.

So my main go-to meal lately has been curry and rice. I'll get the curry pre-made from Costco(Sukhi's Indian Chicken Coconut Curry & Sukhi's Indian Chicken Tikka Masala), cook the entire package and then separate it into half cup portion cubes and freeze them.

Then I'll make a batch of basmati rice, add some seasonings and then separate them into half cup cubes. If I'm super low energy I'll buy some Trader Joes microwave rice bags and cook them all and freeze them into the cubes.

I take the frozen cubes out and vacuum seal it and put it in the freezer. I'll also sometimes mix and match if I have a variety.

Then when I'm hungry I'll just take one curry cube and one rice cube, 2 small sweet potato cubes, and reheat it all for 5-7 minutes at 70%. I'll also throw a piece of Trader Joes Garlic Naan bread in the air fryer.

But in addition to Indian Curry, I'll also freeze Chili, beans, Japanese Curry, Mashed Sweet Potatoes, Macaroni and Cheese, Oatmeal, Chowder, etc. I'm always on the lookout for foods at costco that hit the sweet spot of pre-made and freezable.

I also experimented with making a big batch of burrito ingredients and froze them into portions so I could re-heat and add to a fresh tortilla.

For me this is also perfect because it's in pre-set portions. I have the tendency to ignore when I'm full and if food is readily available I'll just keep eating. So having these frozen means that if I want seconds I need to spend 5-7 minutes re-heating and by that time my stomach has caught up.

I love food. I have been a professional chef, even owned my own catering company at one point. I can cook circles around most people. The most important thing I have learned for meal prepping should be abhorrent to me: stop giving a shit. Make a square meal, make five of them, and shove them in your mouth for lunch. You don't have to make them bad, make them good! But the need for novelty for my weekday work lunch is absurd. Once you commit to just eating "a" lunch, it gets so much easier! That out of the way:
Every Sunday morning at about 8:15am, I go to the grocery store. I go that early, regardless of how I feel from the night before, because that's the most enjoyable time to go to the grocery store: there are fewer people, the staff is freshly stocking produce, "manager special" stuff is freshly marked down. I buy all my breakfasts and lunches for the week on this trip and I rarely go with a list.
For breakfasts, I eat one of two things every day. I either have overnight oats (easy to transport to the office) or a breakfast sandwich (I have this down to about a 5 minute process to scratch make one, though this kind of has to be at home). I make three jars of plain overnight oats with chia seeds and when I pull them out in the morning, I add some mix-ins, a bit of yogurt and I'm set. The oats are nice because you can vary the stuff you mix in from fruit to chocolate and peanutbutter, to plain (gross.) so the blandness of them never gets too exhausting.
For lunches, I usually take a lap of the store and find out what's marked down the most. Chicken is usually marked down on "manager's special" (i.e. - about to expire) which is a nice cost-saver. This usually lets me use the nicer brand chicken for the same price or a little lower than the basic brand. Veggies are all over the place. Sometimes you can catch a good deal on packaged greens or mushrooms, but veggies I'm usually judging based on how good they look. Once I've decided protein and veggies, I think about what dishes bring those two things together. Chicken thighs and broccoli/kale? Sounds like some General Tso's. Chicken Breast and tomatoes/basil? Sounds like some kind of Italian pasta. Any chicken and I want vaguely Indian food? Sounds like tikka masala. It's pretty much always chicken, just based on price and ease of adapting to recipes. Once you have a stable of ideas of chicken+sauce, veggie prep method, and potential starchy base (potato, pasta, rice), it's pretty easy to just mix and match.
I'm usually done with prep, packaged everything up, and am gaming by 10:30 or so. Then all week, I have affordable, reasonably good food for breakfast and lunch. My coworkers all are flabbergasted that I eat the same thing for lunch for the whole week but, to sum up the first paragraph: who gives a shit. It's about having lunch, not a novel little treat every day for lunch (that's for my mid-afternoon snack!) Like others have said, this is the way I manage to eat reasonably healthy. I have portioned, reasonably healthy, and non-hyper processed meals.
Dinners are a bit of a different beast though. My wife and I use EveryPlate (a less-expensive subsidiary of HelloFresh) for three dinners a week. I really like that three of my meals are just planned, done, and ready to go. We both work a lot and removing any need to plan three of the meals (while keeping them easy enough to cook that my wife can step in and do it when needed) is a god send. The other four meals are a mix of "not home" and "eat whatever we feel like". I find that when my diet is maintained across breakfasts and lunches, the little splurges on dinners, both monetarily and nutritionally, feel more special and more intentional.

We don't actually have a meal plan or prep our food ahead of time. Instead, I go to the farmer's market on Sundays and then do a supplemental shop for staples I need afterward and then look at what I have and decide what meals we want to make that week. I have a white board where I write down the meal ideas that has 10 lines on it with a little checkbox to the right of it to say it was done or not.

I pick 10 meal options for us to have based on what we have in the fridge/pantry and each night, we decide what to eat based on the energy levels we have and what we haven't had yet. I always have a range of easy/simple meals to project-level recipes.

I don't do well with most leftovers for texture reasons, so this is a great compromise for me, and Mr. Tired doesn't have to cook most nights, and we've drastically reduced our takeout orders, from several nights a week to just one night most weeks since we've started.

Are meal-boxes out of the question like Hello fresh or something similar? We’ve used them on and off and they have greatly reduced the daily worries about what’s for dinner tonight and honestly made me a better cook and participant.

Less dense of a reply, but shout out to Mealie, a FOSS self-hostable recipe manager with features such as meal planning. Its recipe scraper works pretty well, I love that when I find a recipe I want, I can just import via URL and it will automatically import the parts I want (not the life story of the author). Also nice to have an archive of my recipes, as bookmarks can be unreliable (website goes down, etc).

Every Thursday my wife and I play a strategic game of What do you want for lunches next week? where it cannot be the first thing said to either person when we encounter one another (both work from home on different floors of the house), so cannot just ambush the other without working it into a conversation or during a lull in one. The person asked must provide the first suggestion, the other does not have to accept, but if they don't then it is their turn to come up with a suggestion. Rinse, repeat until an agreed upon meal plan is decided.
I then do the grocery shopping on Friday evening as it avoids weekend crowds and ends my workweek with one last chore leaving my weekend to be my time (or with the holidays, time with other people apparently) and Sunday evenings one of us will cook and pack all the lunches. Rule in our house is whoever doesn't cook does the cleanup afterward. Cooking duties kinda alternate and kinda don't. Depends on who has time, what the meal may be, if one person really wants to cook that week, if it's one person's specialty, etc.

We only meal prep lunches as it's the only meal we both eat consistently. I eat breakfast, my wife does not. She generally eats dinner, I often don't during the week. We also only prep four days worth of meals for a five day workweek as inevitably we'll have something else one day to break it up or I'll go out for lunch on Friday and bring something back for my wife.

I have a farm share so, during the growing season, I never explicitly know what kind or quantity of vegetables I'll be getting. I mean, I have an idea that it's tomato season, but there's always the question of whether it's a good or bad season, a good/bad week in a good/bad season, or a good/bad week for certain types of tomatoes. Three years ago was a banner year for canning tomatoes, this year was a great year for cherry and grape tomatoes but slicing tomatoes was a pretty thin harvest. And when they say "three turnips", sometimes it's little golf-ball-sized things, and sometimes each turnip weighs over a pound. And finally, we also get to do some PYO, which is set on the day of the visit. So I really don't have much information ahead of time.

I also shop the weekly sales for things that store well or are good bargains, but I usually know what those are ahead of time. Anyway, I get the produce from the farm and I spend the evening in front of the television, trimming, peeling, slicing, etc, and I think about dishes as I go.

I have some go-to recipes for the standard growing year, things I can make in any size batches and freeze at least part of - eggplant Parmesan, French onion soup, stuffed peppers/tomatoes, butternut squash bread, etc. And depending on what's on hand, I'll look up new recipes and make those.

I cook my main dishes Saturday morning, trying to use up most of the vegetables. Sunday evening I sit down and make a week's worth of salads, trying to use up whatever vegetables are left over from the main dishes. Anything still left over gets packaged for snacks (sometimes with an old pill bottle of dip) or stored in the freezer to be used as ingredients at a later date.

Over the winter and much of the spring, my goal is to eat through as much of the freezer as I can: I want to have it empty so it gets filled fresh with next year's harvest.

Anyway because of the unpredictability if the farm share, I can't do a lot of farsighted pre-planning; I have a vague idea beforehand, based on what's usually in season, and then I come up with my actual to-cook list when I'm sorting through the box of vegetables.

Super outside take probably, but I don't cook. I don't like it, and I don't like buying tons of ingredients to do it either, even if it's "quick and easy". I live alone so I don't have to worry about preparing things for anyone else. However, I just can't stand doing it (unless it's extremely simple occasional things like Crockpot or throwing frozen stuff in the Air Fryer).

I just buy soups, frozen/refrigerated burritos, pre-made beans/rice kind of dishes, certain kinds of frozen meals, frozen/canned/fresh fruits and veggies. Basically if I can eat it as is, microwave it, air fry it, or a distant fourth- crockpot it, then I go for that.

For me it's simply "I don't want to spend ANY time, energy, or amount of thinking power on food" that leads me to this, and I'm not unhappy about it (and I don't need anyone's nutritional assessment of my choices either).

For times when the budget allows, I'll do mail-based meal plans, but even the cheapest of those is rather expensive (though maybe given grocery price trajectory they're not that bad), so I don't do them right now.

While I understand raw ingredients + cooking can be cheaper, right now I aim for an "okay enough" balance between three different things- nutrition, no cooking, and budget.

I actually consider repeating recipes ( the favorite ones ) a virtue. At some point I remember how to make them without looking them up. That makes it seem easier and makes it more likely that I will cook at home.

I will plan out what I want to try on a Saturday, then go buy the groceries for it later that day or Sunday.

We eat the same 5-6 meals pretty much always.

A large pack of chicken thighs is super versatile if we do decide we have the brain capacity to actually cook, but usually we just use one of those little Indian spice packets, a couple thighs, some frozen veggies and some rice. Theres so many different flavors of packets we really don’t get bored of it.

Less frequent alternatives include chilli, soup, one of those pre made meals at costco, and sometimes when I’m feeling fancy I make salmon and couscous.

We don't fully plan out meals because that level of planning is something that my wife will fight to her dying breath, but when I buy groceries for the week I envision 3-4 meals and just make sure that I have enough other common ingredients to handle improvised meals for the rest of the days. I usually just get one large pack of boneless chicken breasts or thighs, peppers, onions, carrots, garlic, and maybe some potatoes. Then as long as we are stocked up on rice, pasta, dried beans, and seasonings we can pretty much cook whatever. I just add anything out of that when I have something specific in mind or it has been requested by the family.

I've subscribed to Cook Smarts for years now. Its pretty inexpensive. They give you 4 customizable recipes each week. You can choose vegetarian, paleo, or gluten free options if you wish.

On the weekend, we look at our week ahead, decide how many meals we need to cook and adjust the provided recipes (maybe we don't want fish, so we add a different dish from their catalog), then we order the ingredients at our local grocery and pick them up curbside.

They provide you weekend meal prep instructions, so if you want to do that you can. Its been great to lower the cognitive load of coming up with the weekly meals, giving us a varied list of cuisines to eat, and has clear instructions generally.

Been a game changer in my household, and I highly recommend it.

I usually go to the grocery store on Sunday, so Sunday morning over coffee my wife and I make a meal plan for the week. Almost always I pick up a Costco pack of something for breakfasts & as a backup for lunches if we don’t want leftovers from dinner the night before.

Usually, it’s some sort of big batch stew or pasta on Monday that we then can eat throughout the week for lunches.

Tuesday is usually something quick to make, usually some sort of Asian noodles or fried rice.

We usually cook something from Frozen (e.g, PF Chang’s Frozen chicken dinners) on Wednesdays, and then something using the leftover rice on Thursday.

Fridays are usually a frozen pizza, or eating out.

I also use a recipe app that I can easily export a recipe into my “reminders” as a grocery list.