Meal planning is a pain and requires way more cognitive energy than it should.

1. Meal planning allows people to decide what to cook and when, rather than being stuck by a forced decision at 5 PM. This supports multiple goals: - spending money on purpose - selecting foods that are aligned with health, moral, or environmental goals

2. The data is clear: especially for families with kids, eating as a family has many, many benefits. Those benefits are diverse, from improving family bonding to lowering risk of substance abuse. For singles and couples, weight and money management are well supported by meal planning.

There are many solutions that make meal planning easier, from having a service send you food boxes to randomly picking up a cookbook and pointing at a recipe.

Every option has advantages and disadvantages.

This is intended as a resource guide to connect you with many different ways to see what works for you.

Here are the factors many people try to optimize across when deciding HOW to plan:
1) Set up effort. Do I need to create an account? Set up preferences? Put in my own recipes?
2) Flexibility: Can I change the options?
3) Convenience: Is this easy to use?
4) Cost to plan: How expensive is this planning process to use? Is there a one time cost vs a subscription cost?
5) Speed: How long will I spend planning?
6) Shopping support: How do I determine what to buy? Are the lists created for me? Are those lists paired with a retailer, or do I have to put in an order or go shopping myself?
7) Customizability: Does this support my vegan/heart healthy/kid friendly/time stressed needs? 8) Cost of meals: How expensive are the meals this helps me plan? Does it use items I already have, or do I need to buy specialty/expensive/single use ingredients or tools?

Here are the main categories:
1) Physical meal planning: you have a physical thing in your home that helps with meal planning.
2) Online meal planning (self serve): you go online, have to do some setup, configuration, or selection.
3) Online meal plan (determined for you): you go online, and are given a particular meal plan, sometimes with the option to slightly change things.
4) Meal services: they mail you the ingredients (for you to prep) or meals you need for the recipes you select.
5) The old standbys: I won't detail these, but they are valid ways to eat, especially if done on purpose: fast food/restaurants/delivery. What I'd like to suggest is avoid doing these by accident: it is expensive and often not the healthiest option on the planet.