How do you plan out your food day? Do you have a schedule in advance or do you sort of "wing it" each day?

For those that are really organized, what tools do you use to help you figure it out?

I need to get more organized because I have been a "winging it" kind of gal, but I do want to change that so I can start cooking again and having more of a variety of foods.

I use fitday to log my calories. The night before any given day I plan out breakfast, lunch, and two snacks. I type it into fitday and tweak it until it's in the proper range and then I go pack my lunch/snacks and set out breakfast. I'm not a morning person so setting out my breakfast (already pre-measured) is a time saver for me.

Sometimes I pre-plan dinner and sometimes I don't. I usually leave enough room in my day to have between 500-600 calories when I get home. I aim for 1400-1500 cals a day and I try to keep breakfast thru afternoon snack between 800-900 cals. Depending on what I decide to fix for dinner I sometimes have room for extras like wine and chocolate. If I didn't plan dinner the night before I think about it during the day. I usually have a good idea what I'm making when I get home. We keep a variety of fresh veggies in the house (along with staples like brown rice, ww pasta, etc.) So there is always something around that I can throw together.

If I know I'm going out to eat I try to trim down my other meals to compensate. Or, if it's a spur of the moment thing then I go lower the next day (in theory at least. Lol.)

I have a super awesome spreadsheet I made. I plug in how many calories I want to shoot for and the percentages of protein/carbs/fat. It computes how many grams of each I need to shoot for, and I also include 25 grams of fiber. Those are listed at the top of a table.

In the table itself, I list the day's foods and the nutritional values. At the end of each column it shows the totals and the over/under for each value.

I eat the same thing Monday through Friday to make sure I hit my goals and I have no excuses during the work week. On the weekends I count calories only.

It makes grocery shopping easy since I am just buying the same things for five days' worth of food.

This is what I ate this week (approx 1500 calories, 20% fat, 50% carbs, 30% protein):

Breakfast: hard boiled egg; 1/2 cup non-fat vanilla yogurt, 2 tbsp wheat germ, 1 cut up green apple.

Snack: baby carrots and 2 tbsp hummus

Lunch: turkey and cheese on wheat

Snack: banana

Dinner: chicken with 2 cups green beans or peas

Dessert shake: 1/2 cup 1% milk, 2 scoops chocolate protein powder, banana, ice

I make a weekly menu in a word document that contains a list of all the foods we normally eat and I add news one as they come along. I eat the same breakfast and pretty much the same lunch every day of the week. Dinners are the only real variety I allow and I try to keep those containing lots of fresh veggies, lean meat, and high fiber wheat.

I drink a lot of coffee and tea so those are usually my snacks. Oh, I do get one piece of Dove dark chocolate a day.

I have a standard weekly menu in an Excel spreadsheet. Every Saturday I sit down and tweak it (if I hated something, I change if; if there's a new food I want to try, I include it; if I know I will be eating out one day, I figure out how to include it). Then on Sunday I go grocery shopping to buy everything for the week. Each night before a work day I get all the next day's food measured and ready to go the next morning. I also log everything I eat - I used to use FitDay but have recently moved to The Daily Plate. Sometimes I decide to trade out something on my menu plan for something on the spur of the moment, but before I do I always make sure I'm compensating for the calories.

I menu plan on Sunday nights for my family's dinners for the week.

I'm doing WW, so I figure out the points and keep meals within a certain range. (Those who are doing calorie counting could do the same thing with calories, obviously.) Then, I know how much I have left to "spend" on the other meals and snacks during the day. Sometimes I will figure out points for some of the lunch options that are available in my house, and sometimes I just wing it.

On thursday nights or friday mornings (I go shopping on friday afternoons), I find recipes that I want to make using my MasterCook program (which I store recipes in) or online sites. In a Word document, I list a meal plan for the week...I make enough food at dinner so that we can have it the next day for lunch. I look at calories, fiber and fat when I input it into FitDay, but I have a good idea how much that is going to be by looking at the recipe in MasterCook, which lists all of that. I find planning out for the week keeps me on track, I don't have to think everyday, "what am I going to cook?".

I'll confess, I'm not nearly as organized as everyone else, but I do try to plan. I have just a plain old notebook that I write in. I know, sounds very primitive, but it seems to work for me.
I know that based on my schedule I use my calories at certain times of the day. I know that I will use 200-300 calories in the morning and another 200-400 at lunch, and so on. So, my goal everyday is to stay within my range. If I don't plan..well...it gets ugly. I have a few options at breakfast everyday that fit into my normal range, cereal, egg substitute and toast, or sometimes a turkey sandwich. Same for lunch. So I change things around all the time, but it all has to fit. I can fill in some meals a day ahead if I know my plans for the day. It really takes the pressure off and I'm much less likely to think about what I could be having if I have already committed to my choices. HTH