If you love to eat healthy food but suffer from overwhelming decision fatigue when it comes to planning your weekly meals, you are not alone! New data from number one global nutrition and food tracking app, MyFitnessPal, reveals that nearly two thirds (66%) of Aussies struggle with this.

After a long day at work or looking after children (or in some cases both) deciding what to cook can be one more decision too many — particularly if it means calling into the supermarket for ingredients, then prepping and cooking them! You’re tired, you’re hungry…and before you know it, you’re scanning the takeaway menu pinned to your fridge or reaching into the pantry for something less than optimal. We’ve all been there! In fact, nearly half of Aussie’s (45%) report that when meal planning becomes too much, they turn to processed or prepackaged foods for convenience, and around the same number order takeaway at least once a week, simply because they can’t decide what to eat.

If this all sounds a little too familiar, and like us, you love to find little tweaks that you can incorporate into your daily life to lessen the pressure and help everything to run a little smoother, let us introduce you to MyFitnessPal’s new meal Planner function.

The MyFitnessPal Meal Planner

The meal planner is a new feature available through Premium+ subscription of the MyFitnessPal app, and as the name suggests, it makes planning your meals a breeze. Not only can it create personalised meal plans tailored to your food preferences (you can tell it which foods you do and don’t like), dietary restrictions (keto, vegetarian, vegan, Mediterranean etc) and your budget (great for making your grocery shop more affordable), but you can also input your specific goals such as weight loss, muscle gain or maintenance. The meal planner then generates your weekly meal plan to align with these objectives, allowing you to swap out meals with other appropriate substitutes as you please, making it easier to adhere to nutritional and calorie targets.

Just when you think it’s done all the hard work for you – it goes a step further and autogenerates the grocery list too based on the exact number of meals and people you are feeding. How good is that?

What I Love About the MyFitnessPal Meal Planner

Disclosure: I was granted access to MyFitnessPal Premium+ at no cost for the purpose of providing an honest review so that our community can decide if it is something that would benefit them.

Let me start by saying that I have been a long-time user of the free version of the MyFitnessPal app. It’s probably the most used app on my phone (after my social media accounts) and whilst I may swing between tracking my macros religiously some weeks to only using the app to quickly check the nutritional value of a particular product on others, I have used it for many years, and it remains one of my most valued apps.

As a woman in my 40s who exercises for the mental health benefits, and more specifically weightlifts for bone health, metabolic health and to balance hormones and ease perimenopause symptoms, I know that the food I fuel my body with is important. (That is to say…most of the time I try to remember that—just don’t leave an opened family sized chocolate bar within my reach on a bad day!) For me, this means prioritising a good source of protein in each meal along with lots of fresh produce and unprocessed foods.

However, that said, the only way, and I mean the only way, that I can achieve this with any kind of consistency, is if I meal plan and prep my meals ahead of time. Between work and family commitments and carving out 30-45 minutes a day to exercise, by the time the evening rolls around and everyone is throwing those dreaded words, “What’s for dinner?” at me, if I don’t have something prepped and ready to go, or at least planned, all bets are off!

Even when I do meal plan, (and my kids will be the first to tell me), I do tend to get stuck in a bit of a food rut, cooking the same things over and over because 1) I know they will eat it, and 2) my brain is incapable of making any more decisions that day!

So for me, the meal planner has been a real game changer. Not only am I able to set my daily calorie and macro targets, but I’ve also discovered some new, delicious, easy and budget-friendly ways to hit them.

Rather than dreading meal planning and grocery shopping for the week, I sit down on a Saturday morning with the app and within a few minutes I’ve chosen my meals for the week and have a precise shopping list — not just saving me time and money but also reducing food waste and optimising my grocery spend! You’ve got to love that1

All of the recipes I’ve tried so far over the last 6 weeks have been really easy to follow — no difficult or tricky steps — just nutritious, tasty meals made from real ingredients, and my family has enjoyed not eating the same handful of meals on repeat!

Whether you are a busy professional or a parent who wants a structured, healthy and efficient meal planner, a gym goer or fitness focused individual aiming to track macros and adhere to a specific diet, or someone who is budget-conscious and seeking to reduce food waste and cost, the MyFitnessPal meal planner is a next-level solution!