 Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and welcome to a video that has been highly requested by a number of you and that is how I meal plan. How do I determine A, what I'm going to be eating for the week? How do I determine B, what I'm going to be meal prepping for breakfast, lunch and snacks to take to work? C, where do I find my recipe inspiration? And D, how do I put it all together and develop a meal plan for the entire week for all of my meals, snacks and everything. So today I'm going to show you exactly what I do to meal plan step by step. I'm going to show you my meal planner and I'm going to show you some tips and tricks that I use to make sure that I am following WW freestyle to the T. So if you want to see everything that I have in store for you on this meal planning video, just keep watching. So to start my meal prepping for the week, I'm going to always start in my pantry and in my refrigerator. I want to see exactly what I have on hand so that when I find the recipes that I want to use that I won't purchase duplicate items. In addition to that, I may have certain meat that I want to use up so that I can search for recipes that use that meat. So first let's start in my pantry. So I will typically just go in, pop the light on in here for you guys too so you can see a little bit better, but I'll go ahead and I'll make a quick scan of my pantry. Ignore how messy it is. I need to do another clean, but I'll do a quick scan of my pantry to determine what I already have. So when I'm looking up recipes, if I see duplicate ingredients, I'll know that I have that on hand. So one thing that I pay special attention to is typically my canned food so that I'm not buying duplicate canned food. And then I'm always going to check my husband's snacks. This is his little snack bin when I'm doing my grocery list as well to make sure that I have snacks on hand for him. So I'm just going to again do a scan, make sure that I don't buy duplicate pantry items. And after I scan through my pantry, I'm going to go ahead and move to my refrigerator and my freezer. And again, I'm going to do a scan. I'm just going to see what I have on hand. I'm mainly looking at staples, coffee cream or eggs. I'm looking at what cheese is and then of course what vegetables I have. And I'm also going to of course scan quickly the condiments that I have on hand because I don't need to be buying several of the same condiment. So I do a quick scan of my refrigerator. And then from there, I'm going to do a quick scan as well of my freezer. And I'm going to see especially what I'm looking for here is meat. What meat and frozen vegetables do I already have on hand? So I'm going to make sure that I'm going through everything that I'm making sure that I'm not doubling up on my frozen items. And that will just keep me from overspending at the grocery store. Once I've made my rounds and my pantry, my refrigerator, my freezer, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to pull out my meal planner. I'm going to pull out my computer and I'm going to start looking for recipes. So you'll see here that I'm on the Drizzle Me skinny website. So I can go directly to her recipes by clicking here where it says all recipes. If I click on that, it's going to be bringing up all of the different recipes that she has on her website. So in the event that you're just looking for recipes, you're not tailoring them specifically to the food that you have on hand. You're just looking for recipes in general that sound good that you'd like to create for the upcoming week. You can just go to these Weight Watchers approved sites and look for recipes. So here's a turkey hash brown breakfast casserole. So if that sounds good to me, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to open up the recipe and I'm going to do a quick scan because I want to see exactly what is in the recipe. So scroll down to what exactly is in the recipe and then start going through the inventory that you have in your house. So I know that I have ground turkey, salt, pepper, sage, oregano. Now I know that I do not have three cups of frozen hash browns. So that would have to be added to my grocery list. I do not have the bacon. I'm good on the cheese. That's a lot of eggs. So I probably would add an additional dozen of eggs to my grocery shopping list because that is going to use all of them. But to milk, I'm good. My husband loves milk. So I always have that on hand green onions. I probably would add fresh ones to my list. So that is one way that you guys can look up recipes by going to specific WW blogs or low carb, low fat, whatever you're following blogs. So if you're unsure who are the WW bloggers out there, the people that have recipes in the search bar here, if you just type in Weight Watchers recipes, it's going to pull up so many options. Look at that 40 Weight Watchers dinner recipes under six smart points, best 25 plus Weight Watcher recipes, 75 best Weight Watcher recipes. So you literally can't. Oh, hey, look, there's my video. That's pretty funny. So you literally can just go ahead and click on one of these. It'll open up and there should be in this particular post 42 Weight Watchers recipes. So that's one way to find recipes. If you aren't familiar with exactly who the people are that post WW recipes online. So you can either search by the blog or by the website. If you know of those WW websites, for example, Drizzle Me Skinny, Skinny ish dish.com, WW pound dropper. Those are all fabulous bloggers that have actual WW recipes. But you can also do this route as well where you're literally just going to type in Weight Watchers recipes and up pop recipes. So here's slow cooker turkey with berry compote. So that's another way for you to search for recipes. So you can either search by the person you know that puts out WW recipes or up here, you can just simply type in Weight Watchers recipes and it'll pull up anything and everything Weight Watchers related. Another way that you can find recipes is type in the protein source that you want to use. So you know that you are loaded up to the gills with chicken. Go ahead and type in your search bar, chicken, Weight Watcher recipes hit search and it will pop up recipes solely using chicken. So here you can see all of the recipes that being suggests with the keywords chicken, WW recipes. There are a ton. So let's say that you're interested in this chicken and mushrooms. It specifically says WW. You can click on that. It will pull up that particular recipe so that you can see exactly what else you need other than chicken. So this is a chicken and mushroom. So you know you have the chicken. That's why you put that as one of your keywords in your recipe and then you're literally going to do what I did and go through the recipe, figure out what you have on hand and what you don't have on hand so that you know how to recreate your grocery list from there. If you click here where it says read full directions, it actually pulls up the recipe with all of the directions. So that's another easy way for you to find WW friendly recipes. One other piece of advice. If you are searching on the internet for recipes that contain a specific ingredient such as chicken or ground beef or steak and you don't search out Weight Watcher recipes, just make sure that you are tweaking the recipe like you see me do time and time again on my channel to fit into WW. So omit oils or change butter to light butter or just change your ingredients around to make it a little bit more WW friendly. That is where it becomes a little bit more of a challenge and that is why YouTube is such a great resource for recipes because we've already done the tweaking. That way you don't have to try to figure out what to substitute the higher point items with. But just a word of wisdom, make sure that you tweak it to make it WW friendly. Again, if you're searching for recipes that aren't Weight Watchers already. A fourth great place to find WW friendly recipes is Pinterest. So this makes it super easy to find recipes as well. If you go up here to the search bar and you type in Weight Watchers, it is going to pull up Weight Watchers recipes. Now word of caution on Pinterest. These are recipes that random people have posted. I will caution you that not all of the recipe point values are correct because again, these are just people listing recipes on Pinterest. So keep that in mind whenever you're looking on Pinterest or a non WW related website. Make sure that you are taking time to recalculate the point of the recipes. So by typing Weight Watchers in the search bar, look at this, you guys. Here comes a bazillion Weight Watcher recipes. So literally just tons and tons will pull up. Now let's say that you want to narrow your recipe down. You're going to go back up here to your search bar and again, let's say that you want to use chicken. So you can type in chicken WW recipes or chicken recipes or chicken Weight Watcher recipes or whatever it is that you want to be searching for. Go ahead and type that up here in the search bar and then it will pull up all of the recipes on Pinterest that are WW freestyle that contain chicken. You could do this with pasta. You can do this with mushrooms, like you name it, whatever ingredient you have on hand. Pinterest allows you to search by the ingredients. So that is super, super cool. So number four way to find recipes is on Pinterest. The fifth place that you can find WW friendly recipes. Of course, you guys is directly on Weight Watchers app or Weight Watchers website. I love these recipes as well because it clearly tells you the points value. So you can search by dinner or breakfast. You can even search by type of meal or ingredient as well on the Weight Watchers website. And before we move into the sixth place that you guys can find recipes, I want to preface this with I know searching for recipes is tough. I know you don't always really know what you're going to get. You don't know if they're tried and true. You don't know if the points values are correct. So before I talk about number six, I want to point out that YouTube honestly is one of the best places to find recipes. Let us do the work. Let us figure out the points. Let us find exactly what you need to do for the recipe. Let us show you step by step how to create the dish. So I would recommend if you are a little gun shy of searching on the internet and trying to play with it and make a grocery list based off of that, go to YouTube and check out YouTube. That is a great resource for recipes. And the last thing I want to point out is searching for other recipes that maybe aren't WW recipes. I would recommend even doing that as well. So if you just type in chicken recipes, it's going to pull up anything and anything that has chicken in it. They will not be WW friendly. So you would have to make sure that you're modifying the recipe to fit into the WW lifestyle. I know this part is tricky. So that is what YouTube is for. And that is what a lot of the other WW recipe sites are for. But that is six ways for you guys to find recipes to stay within your points. So once I've done my research and I've figured out exactly what I want to make, I will go ahead and print the recipe. That way I have it on hand so that I have it readily available when I'm making it. Now if you don't have the option to print that is okay as well, screenshot it, jot it down, whatever you have to do. And then from there I go through and I look at the ingredients that is in the recipe. And then I start to formulate both my grocery list as well as my meal plan. So again, I use the Keri L Meal Planner. I am obsessed with this meal planner. It is awesome. It has everything you ever needed to meal plan. The yellow tab here, that is the meal planning tab. So that is where you're not only going to find your monthly calendar for your meals. You're also going to find a week by week list of your menu. And then of course there is a perforated detachable grocery list. So essentially what I do is I list the dates out and then I start planning my meals. So let's say on Monday I am going to make copycat, taco bell, meat and potato burritos. So this was a few weeks ago. So I will go through that recipe by looking at all of the ingredients. What I don't have, I will go ahead and I will add it to my grocery list. Makes it really easy. I go through recipe by recipe, whatever I don't have on hand, I add to my grocery list. When I am done, I tear off my perforated grocery list and I'm good to go. I have everything I need to go to the grocery store. I find that by printing off the recipes, for me it makes it a lot easier. So you can see here that I will kind of pre-plan recipes. I will print off things that I think sound good. For me, if I have videos coming down the pipe of specific things, I will print off the recipes for that. Now, let me show you what I do for recipes that are not WW friendly. So here's one, sugar cookies. Clearly, that is not going to be WW friendly. So I go through the ingredients one by one and you'll see here that I make little notes. So this recipe calls for one cup or two sticks of salted butter. I'm going to go ahead and use light butter. So anytime I'm making a modification, I just make a note of it next to the recipe and then that makes it really, really easy for me to figure out exactly what I need to be adding to my grocery list for that particular recipe to do those modifications. So this is a recipe where I just searched for what I wanted and then it's my responsibility to make the modifications. I have to plug all of these ingredients and the number of servings into the recipe builder to determine how many smart points this particular recipe is. Now, I do have a video on my channel that walks you through step by step how to use the recipe builder. I will link that down in the description box. So this is definitely the hardest way to determine a recipe, but sometimes it's necessary because not every recipe that I want to make is a WW recipe. So there are lots of ways for you guys to find fabulous recipes and the Kerry L meal planner makes it so easy to not only note your recipe, create your grocery list and you can even plan your recipes out by the month like I started doing here for the month of April and then it's at a glance for me. So this is today, the second. So tonight I'm making pizza pockets and salad. So the night before because I need to plan out my meal because I work is I go ahead and see what I'm planning on making for dinner. I pull out any meat that's in the freezer, get it ready to go and then I make sure that I have all of the ingredients that I'm supposed to have, which I'm pretty particular about grocery shopping. So I usually do have all of the ingredients, but I double check because if I don't, I can simply make a quick run to the store and grab those ingredients. So the meal planner, my friends is a complete and utter lifesaver. Oh, one more thing I want to show you. See the little orange tab that says inventory. Here's where you can make a note of the inventory in your freezer as well as the inventory in your pantry. So this is a really good way at a glance to see what you have on stock. This is a project that I am planning on working on here shortly, is doing the inventory of what I have on hand so that when I am meal planning, I could easily just take a peek at my meal planner and everything I need to know is in my meal planner. So again, if you are looking for a fabulous meal planner, I highly recommend the Cario. In my opinion, it is the best meal planner on the market. My all time number one tip on meal planning, set yourself up for success. Figure out what you want to make, gather your tools to make that, whatever those may be, get your recipes ready to go for the week. And I promise you, meal planning is not as crazy and time consuming as it sounds. And you can always use those of us on YouTube to help make your meal planning a little bit easier. Thank you for joining me on another video. I hope that you enjoyed getting to learn how I meal plan, how I actually put it all together to have a good successful week on WW Freestyle. I hope you enjoyed the tips, the tricks. Make sure that you check out my Cari L meal planner. The link is down in the description box. And of course, you will save 10% and get free shipping. I'm telling you having the tools to succeed is so important. And the Cari L meal planner is amazing. There is not another meal planner on the market that beats the Cari L. So if you're new to my channel, I'd like to extend a warm welcome. Make sure that you hit the little red subscribe button and the little bell. That'll notify you every time that I upload a new video. I would love it if you would give this video a thumbs up. Comment below. Let me know what you thought of this meal plan video. If I helped you with some tips and tricks. And what do you think about getting yourself the Cari L meal planner? And of course, have a wonderful day. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.