The No-Decision Menu

Remove food decisions from your week.

  • These are default recipes you can plug into your schedule.

  • Use one or two per meal category and repeat as needed.

  • I picked these so you don’t have to think about it.

Breakfast

Lunch

  • Option A: Mediterranean Chicken Wraps - You can pack these with whatever protein you want, get creative with how you stuff them, and even freeze these for 2-3 months.

  • Option B: Italian Pasta Salad Under 20 minutes to make which means it’s a good lunch you could even make the day of.

Dinner

  • Option A: Chicken Shawarma Sheet Pan Dinner - Serve this with your grain of choice, perfect for busy weeknights or bulk cooking for a few dinners.

  • Option B: Asparagus Pasta - I love making pasta on Monday nights, since it’s easy and filling. This is a fun recipe that’s quick to make.

When food is decided ahead of time, energy shows up where it matters.

The System

You never actually learned how to grocery shop the right way. Right?

Think about it.

You either tagged along with a parent as a kid, or you started winging it once you lived on your own.

There’s no adult handbook for grocery shopping.

You just…get it done.

No imagine taking that same approach to:

  • Running an important process at work

  • Rebuilding your car’s engine

  • Landing a plane

It’d be a complete shit show.

Yet that’s exactly how most people handle the thing that fuels ALL their decisions each week.

I’ll teach you how to grocery shop with a proven framework.

Your meal planning foundation is your grocery list.

It’s the ground floor of a week that actually works.

Years ago, I was responsible for ordering $200,000 worth of food at a time in the U.S. Coast Guard.

That food had to last months. At sea. With limited restock windows during six-month deployments.

And sometimes the groceries at foreign ports were…not ideal.

One time in Central America I received a couple hundred pounds of bone-in chicken that looked like it’d been supercharged by something from a super hero movie.

They were unusually GIANT and still had feathers in parts of them.

A little suspicious for sure.

The first time I had to place that big of a food inventory order before a long time out at sea, I was sweating bullets.

What if:

  • I ordered the wrong amount of food

  • it didn’t arrive in time

  • the food didn’t fit in the freezer

But I learned something simple.

Break the project into smaller pieces.

This is the only way to cut decision fatigue completely.

Same goes for grocery shopping for your household.

Step 1: Plan your meals first 

SO many people write a grocery list before figuring out what they need to cook for the whole week.

That’s backwards.

It’d be like picking out a dishwasher, before your house is built.

Start with the meals.

If you’re new to this, keep it simple:

  • 1 Breakfast

  • 1 Lunch

  • 1 Dinner

Repeat them throughout the week.

The more experience you have, the more meals you can plan at once and rotate in.

Step 2: Reverse-engineer your grocery list

Now break each meal down by ingredients and servings.

Let’s say we’re making oatmeal with granola for breakfast, three times this week.

One serving:

  • 1 cup of oatmeal

  • .5 cup of granola

  • .5 cup of berries

Multiple by three.

Your list becomes:

  • 3 cups of oatmeal

  • 1.5 cups of granola

  • 1.5 cups of berries

Do this for every planned meal.

Then categorize and combine duplicate ingredients.

This is where grocery shopping becomes frictionless.

The main categories I use are:

  1. Produce

  2. Protein

  3. Grains

  4. Pantry

  5. Dairy

  6. Other/Snacks

When your list is categorized:

  • Shopping is faster

  • You forget fewer items

  • You waste less money

  • You can cross-check what you already have

This alone changes everything.

Step 3: Keep a weekly staples list

This is simple, but POWERFUL.

Create a master checklist of items you use every week.

Think about snacks, daily essentials, and quick add-ons.

Examples:

  • Eggs

  • Milk

  • Fruit

  • Pasta

  • Coffee

  • Bread

Keep this save in your phone.

Each week, copy and paste it into your new grocery list.

(I use the reminder app on my phone)

This will save you a couple hours of mental energy each week.

Combining the ‘staples’ and the ‘weekly meals’ creates a foolproof grocery list.

At first, it might feel slow.

Trust me, I wasn’t fast the first time I ordered $200,000 in food.

But this framework compounds each week.

It gets faster, cleaner, and will run on auto-pilot.

I break it down in more detail (with some extra steps) inside my free Grocery List Blueprint.

Your Saturday system reset, same time next week.

Steven | Meal Planning OS

P.S. I’d love your feedback. Use the poll below or reply to this email.

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Whenever You’re Ready

Here’s how I can help:

1) YouTube Channel — Binge my best videos on reducing decision fatigue by building a repeatable meal plan.

2) Previous Newsletters — Read all of my previous meal planning system breakdowns.

3) Apply to the Meal Planning OS Founding Program — I’m opening up a small founding group to build the first version.

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