Family Friendly Healthy Meal Plan for October
I’m so happy to be back sharing my monthly meal plans. This family friendly healthy meal plan for October ought to give you lots of ideas for healthier dinners for your family. Full disclosure, this meal plan isn’t 100% compliant for anything, I just do my best to feed my family healthier things that they enjoy. It won’t be perfect, and if there are any meals you don’t consider to be healthy, please feel free to skip those, you don’t have to use them. I have a few other tricks to ensuring my family is eating healthier, beyond dinner, and I’ll share those, as well.
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Free monthly meal planner printable
As always, you can get this monthly meal planning sheet by signing up for my email list, below. It is editable, so you can open it in Adobe Reader and type your meals into the spaces, or you can print it like I do to write out your meals for the month.
How to meal plan for a month
Okay, so I shared my process for meal planning for an entire month in a video, but here’s basically what I do.
- I keep a Pinterest board full of dinner ideas
- I make a mental note or keep a list of the ones that we’ve tried that we really liked
- I check Pinterest and choose 10-12 meals, I try to do 75% things I know we will like and give us a couple of new meals to try, but I stick to things I know my family likes in general
- I repeat most of the meals I choose twice in the month, this lets me purchase double on meat that I find a good deal on, or buy other ingredients in more of a bulk option than just purchasing for one meal does
- I use my month at a glance meal planner to plug the meals in, accounting for some days “off” for eating out, cooking something special, or having leftovers.
- Using the month at a glance I can make sure we aren’t eating chicken three days in a row, but we don’t have to follow this plan exactly or eat the meals in this order each week. Usually when I do my weekly planning I’ll plug my dinners into my planner and that’s where I really plan the specifics of when we will eat what
What about breakfasts, lunches, and snacks?
This meal plan that I do just includes dinner. This is mostly because my family is pretty repetitive for the other meals. Lately, I’ve been doing avocado toast for breakfast and a fab 4 smoothie for lunch, plus fruit or veggies for snacks. My kids will usually eat a combination of about 3 different breakfast choices they like, and probably once a month or so I’ll get them cereal and that’s what they’ll have for that week. Usually they also have a banana every morning and then for snacks, pretzels or cheezits and fruit- apples and grapes are their favorites.
I try to keep the snacks really accessable, they can grab what they want from the fruit drawer and then my older son is home right now so if he wants to do grapes he can get those and wash them for him and his brother, too. For lunch, they typically do a sandwich or a lunch meat/cheese “roll up” with some pretzels or cracker, they might have more fruit but maybe not, since they sometimes eat fruit 2x a day for snacks.
I have gotten them to be pretty self sufficient here and they pick what they want and even fix their own lunches most days. But, basically we are pretty boring and eat the same selection of things so there’s no real reason to meal plan this part.
Okay, so let’s look at our dinners for October.
October meal plan
Just a reminder we usually do our main course, and then unless it already has veggies in the recipe we will do 2 veggies along with this. If the recipe has no carbs I’ll add rice or potatoes, usually cooked in the air fryer.
- Chicken Bites, potatoes, veggies
- One Pot Chicken & Rice
- Chicken Scampi, veggies
- Pizza Meat Balls, french fries
- Crock pot pork chops, potatoes, veggies
- Meatloaf muffins, rice, veggies
- Chicken Pot Pie Soup
- Lasagna Soup
- Brown Sugar & Garlic Chicken, potatoes, veggies
- Garlic shrimp, rice, veggies
- Chili
I hope this family friendly healthy October meal plan has given you some meal planning ideas and inspiration. If you have any meal planning questions, please be sure and leave them below so I know what to share next!
You might also want to check out these other meal plans and meal planning tips!
