Search "weekly meal plan" and you get somebody else's menu: seven days of food chosen for a body that is not yours, a budget that is not yours and a Tuesday evening that never happened. Copy it and you last four days. The method below produces a plan you wrote, which is the only kind that survives.
Step 1 — one number, then leave it alone
Work out roughly what you burn and take a few hundred calories off it. The NIH Body Weight Planner2 does the arithmetic honestly, including the awkward part most calculators skip: the number goes down as you do. A deficit of 300–500 kcal a day is the range the NHS weight-management guidance1 works within, and it is slow enough that your week does not revolve around it.
Step 2 — decide the shape of a plate, not the recipes
Before any dish gets chosen: protein, vegetable, starch, and something with fat in it. That structure is what makes a meal filling at a given calorie count, and it is the whole of balanced eating3 in one sentence. Recipes are just ways of arriving at that shape.
Step 3 — pick four dinners, not seven
Seven distinct dinners is a project. Four, with two of them cooked in double portions, fills the week and cuts the cooking in half. Nobody has ever abandoned a plan because Thursday looked like Tuesday.
Step 4 — make breakfast a default
The meal you eat while half awake should not require a decision. One or two breakfasts on rotation, both hitting 25–30 g of protein, removes a daily choice at the exact hour you are worst at making it.
Step 5 — write the list from the plan, in that order
Ingredients come out of the dishes, never the other way round. Then check the list for anything appearing only once, and either find it a second home or take it off — single-use ingredients are what your bin is made of.
Step 6 — leave one slot empty
One dinner a week with nothing planned in it. There will be a night you eat out, or cannot face cooking, and a plan with room for that is a plan you did not break. Harvard's healthy weight guidance4 makes the same point in a longer form: what determines the outcome is the pattern across weeks and months, not the perfection of any single day.
What the week looks like when it works
Two breakfasts on rotation. Lunch is last night's dinner in a box. Four dinners, two of them doubled. One open evening. A shopping list of about twenty items, most of which show up in more than one meal. That is the whole system, and it fits on the back of an envelope.
