Eating healthy doesn’t have to be stressful or boring. If you like to cook real food this Real Plans review will show you how a smart and easy to use tool can help you get delicious food on the table for you and your family minus the stress that comes with the usual planning, organization and shopping.
Let me ask you this…do any of the following sound familiar to you?
- You’re way to busy and don’t have hours to slave away in the kitchen each day
- You want to eat healthy but don’t have time for the planning and organization of it all
- You’re tired of the same boring meals and need inspiration for what to cook
- You’re dealing with picky eaters (or maybe are one yourself :)
- You’re new to cooking healthy meals and need some help getting started
Join the club of millions of other people who want to eat healthy and are either too busy, need some motivation, or are totally new to cooking real food. We all know that the challenge to cook real food is real when it comes to busy lifestyles. It can be hard to keep up with.
Lucky for you, Real Plans makes healthy eating stress-free, delicious, and sustainable. Real Plans has seriously changed the way we eat in our house and I’m so excited to share with you how it can do the same for you and your family, so let’s get started!
What Exactly is Real Plans?
Real Plans is a subscription based meal planning service. The first thing to know is that you will be shopping and cooking, this is not a meal delivery service, so you won’t be receiving food ingredients or meals to your doorstep. If that’s what your after, see my review here. What you will get is an easy to use online subscription with access to over 1500 delicious recipes to suit every taste – even picky eaters. Recipes are tested and family-approved.
Your subscription gives you access to all meal plans, including:
- Classic Healthy
- WHOLE30
- Paleo
- Autoimmune Paleo
- Vegetarian
- Dairy Free & Gluten Free
- GAPS
- FODMAP
All meal plans are fully customizable. After you customize your settings to your families needs, including how many servings, diet type, and which meals you want to cook (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and on which days, Real Plans will choose meals accordingly and add them to your menu for you.
Set these options up once in the beginning and you’re good to go – unless you decide to change anything, which you can easily do at any time. Real Plans is seriously the smartest and most user friendly meal planning I’ve come across and makes cooking simple and enjoyable.
Oh, and Real Plans is so confident that these meal plans will change your life for the better that if for any reason you are dissatisfied, they offer a 10 day money back guarantee.
If you have not had much success with meal plans in the past, trust me when I say Real Plans is not your average rigid meal planning service. It’s meal planning taken to a whole other level, with all the flexibility you could ever need.
As a Real Plans user myself, allow me to walk you through how it works and just how cool it is to use!
How Real Plans Works – Easy as 1,2,3
Once you have signed up for your Real Plans subscription, let the fun begin by choosing your options for your customized meal plans, which is done in 3 easy steps.
Step 1 – Select your hemisphere, timezone, US or Metric measures, and where you usually shop
Step 2 – Select which plan fits your dietary needs
Step 3 – Choose which day of the week you want to start your weekly plan, whether you are eating for one, two, or a family, how many servings, and which meals and days of the week you want to cook
Voila! Meal plan done! These 3 easy steps get your meal plans set up in a matter of a few minutes. Simple as that – Real Plans automagically selects recipes based on your selections and adds them to your meal planner each and every week, which looks like this…
What About My Shopping List?
Along with your weekly plan, Real Plans automagically creates your shopping list each and every week.
Before you shop, simply check off any items you already have (usually staples like oils, spices, etc.) to remove them. Add notes and any other items you need to shop for outside of your meal plan so you end up with one tidy and accurate shopping list that you can either send to your email to print out or access on your phone.
You can also download the Real Plans App to access on your iPhone or Android, which is super handy.
Someone else doing the shopping (like maybe your hubby)? Just send the list to them. You can even take pictures of hard to find products so your hubby will know exactly which item you want him to get.
How Do I Know When to Prep Things?
Another cool feature that really helps save time and keep you organized is the timeline feature, which reminds you when to do certain things like defrost meats, soak nuts, and anything else that needs to be done ahead of cooking time to save you the headache of trying to remember more things.
Can I Make Modifications?
So those are the basics. Pretty simple right? If that’s the way you like it than you’re all set to keep using it that way. But when first introducing Real Plans, people asked for more modifications and the folks at Real Plans listened. So the features don’t end there! Real Plans offers even more smart options should you choose to use them.
Want more control over your plan? With Real Plans you can modify your weekly plans. Maybe you want to swap a meal for a different one. Easy. Just delete that meal, search the recipe box for one you want and add it in its place. Feeling like you want to choose all your own meals this week? Easy. Just delete all meals for this week and add the ones you choose from the recipe box, instead.
Personally, I use the modification option pretty frequently since I like to choose and don’t mind spending a few extra minutes doing so. On the flip side, if it’s a super busy week I can just sit back and have all my meals chosen for me. Either way, the amount of time you save and the way Real Plans simplifies cooking has been a complete game-changer for us!
Not cooking for the entire family one night? Just adjust the serving size for that one meal and your shopping list will update as well. Throwing a dinner party? The same thing applies. Here’s a glance at how simple it is to modify your weekly plan. And the cool thing is, you can modify your plan as often as you like, while your main settings always remain the same.
You can even modify to exclude certain ingredients. For example, say you don’t eat pork or eggs, just check to exclude pork and eggs, and recipes with those ingredients won’t be included in your plan. This is a great option for those with food allergies.
A note on modifications: Your weekly plan may include an extra like a recipe for a basic chicken stock (shown below for example), so be sure to look for that in case you want to opt out. Simply delete it so it won’t show up on your shopping list.
What if I Have Favorite Recipes I Want to Incorporate in My Plan?
Have a favorite family recipe, craving something specific, or maybe you just came across a recipe elsewhere you want to try? Great! There is an “import” option that allows you to add recipes from other sources right into the recipe box so that they are accessible for whenever you want to add them to your weekly plan. I use this option and it works great. You can see the “import recipe” box below.
Why I Love Real Plans
Let me first start by saying that I love to eat healthy but if it’s not easy enough I find it challenging and difficult to stick with. I guess you could also say I’m a bit of a foodie. I love delicious tasting food, it doesn’t need to be “fancy” but it has to taste yummy. I love ethnic foods but also love classic american fare.
I enjoy making meals from scratch, but if I have to spend too much time trying to plan, organize, shop, or cook, I’m likely not to. And lastly, it’s important that the meals I make are also enjoyable for the Mr. who has the remnants of a picky-ish-meat-all-day-everyday-no-vegetables eater.
That said, Real Plans has met each one of these needs and more! It has totally simplified the way we eat, and myself and the Mr. both agree that we have yet to eat a meal we haven’t found to taste really delicious. With Real Plans, I actually look forward to meal planning each week!
Here are just a few meals we’ve enjoyed, made with Real Plans
Slow Cooked Garlic Chicken and Chopped Broccoli Salad with Sesame and Cranberries
Chickpea Butternut Squash Curry
Quinoa with Beets and Caramelized Onions and Maple Brussels Sprouts
Lime Marinated Flank Steak and Japanese Spaghetti Squash Noodles
How Real Plans Has Been a Complete Game-Changer for me
- Saves me the time and stress that usually comes with planning, organizing, shopping, and cooking
- Saves me money – I buy exactly what’s on the list in the right portions, which = no more wasted food
- Saves time and helps me stay on track by eating healthy leftovers for lunch
- Eliminates the rut of what to eat and encourages me to be more adventurous in the kitchen, which makes healthy eating fun
How Much Does it Cost?
There are 3 subscription options:
- Monthly – $19/month
- Quarterly – $14/month
- Annually – $7/month
Again, all plans are backed by a 10 day money back guarantee, so you’ve got nothing to lose! Why not make eating real food simple and fun? Your busy enough, right?! Check out Real Plans and see if they are a good fit for you and your family.
What You Get
♥ Customized weekly meal plans
♥ Adjustable serving sizes
♥ Access to over 2000 delicious and tested recipes including nutritional data
♥ Automagically generated shopping lists
♥ Timeline reminders
♥ Recipe importer
♥ IOS and Andriod mobile app
♥ Get started here for as little as $7/month ♥
Happy meal planning!
Questions or comments? Leave them in the section below and I’ll be sure to get back to you!
I am using real plans. You have really said it all in this review. It really makes planning for shopping very easy and the meals are great. I would recommend this program to anyone.
Thanks for the feedback and I’m so happy you enjoy Real Plans =)
I’m getting hungry just reading this. Thanks for the great healthy tips I had no idea you could be so creative with healthy food. I’m definitely going to try the Real Plan the look like they have some amazing recipes that could save me so much time and effort.
thanks for sharing
Awesome Louise! I’m excited for you and hope you love how simple and delicious Real Plans is! Thanks for stopping by =)
An interesting post about an interesting service. Thanks, Jess.
It sort of reminds me of those paint-by-number kits for beginning artists. It seems to me it teaches you a system that (if you become interested in making your meals even more personalized) can become more customized for yourself and your family.
If nothing else, signing up for the plan and getting into the habit of following the things could be a way to train yourself to construct meal plans on your own once you’ve learned the basics of meal-planning.
No problem and thanks for taking the time to comment. Trust me, I’m no stranger to meal planning but this service is so much more. We use it on a weekly basis in our house and aside from how much it’s simplified our meals, we get super excited about trying new recipes all the time…Real Plans has made meals so much more exciting for us! Plus they’re healthy meals so it’s a total win :) Love, love and totally recommend this service!