The weekly meal plan handoff checklist

Before you build the week

• Get the weekly grocery number, not a rangeAsk what she actually spends at the store in a week and where she shops. A plan that assumes a specialty market and forty dollars more per week fails on the first trip, and she will not tell you that is why.
• Map the real cooking window for each weeknightGet minutes, not adjectives. Good looks like Monday twenty minutes, Tuesday nothing because of a late shift, Wednesday forty. Anything you plan into a night with no window is a meal she will skip.
• List everyone who eats at the tableA partner, teenagers or a parent she cooks for change the plan completely. Plans that require her to cook twice on a weeknight are abandoned faster than any other kind.
• Confirm medical and GI constraints in writingReflux, IBS triggers, a GLP-1 medication changing appetite, warfarin and vitamin K, renal limits or a swallowing issue. Write them into the file so a future plan does not quietly reintroduce something you removed.
• Record what she already eats and likesThree breakfasts she would repeat, two dinners she cooks well, and the foods she will not eat under any conditions. Building from her existing repertoire beats introducing a new one every time.
• Ask what happened to the last plan she triedMost adult clients have followed a plan before. The specific point where the last one broke, usually a weekend or a work trip, tells you where this one will break too.

Building Sunday's plan

• Repeat breakfast at least four daysVariety at breakfast buys nothing and costs decisions at the worst hour of the day. Two options across the week is plenty, and it shortens the grocery list.
• Cap the week at six distinct recipesUse leftovers deliberately for at least two dinners. More recipes means more ingredients, more spoilage and more chances for Wednesday to collapse into takeout.
• Write the grocery list by store sectionProduce, protein, dairy, pantry, frozen. Include quantities in the units the store sells, so she is not converting recipe grams to package sizes in the aisle.
• Mark two dinners as swappableName the swap explicitly, for example the sheet pan chicken can move to Thursday or become the frozen backup. Planned flexibility keeps a bad night from ending the whole week.
• Match portions to her actual appetite patternIf she barely eats before noon, do not plan a large breakfast to fix it in week one. Meet the current pattern first and move it in later weeks.
• Check the plan against the medical constraints againRead the constraint list one more time against the finished week. This is the last cheap moment to catch a conflict before it reaches her kitchen.

Handing the plan over

• Read Monday through Wednesday out loud with herSay the meals and ask where each one breaks. Objections that never surface in a document surface in ninety seconds of talking through the first three days.
• Agree what counts as following the planDefine it out loud: most meals most days, swaps allowed, one takeout night is not a failure. Undefined success turns one missed dinner into a reason to quit.
• Set the grocery trip as a specific appointmentDay and time, not a vague weekend. A plan without a scheduled shop is a plan that starts on Tuesday, which is already too late for the week.
• Name the failure point before it happensTell her which night you expect to be hardest and what to do instead. Being right about Wednesday builds more credibility than any part of the plan working perfectly.
• Confirm how the daily check in arrivesPhone, portal or app, and at what hour. Send a test one before she leaves so the first real prompt is not the first time she sees it.

Week one follow through

• Check the Tuesday signal while the week is still savableTwo days in, look at whether breakfast held and whether Monday dinner happened. A Tuesday message costs you a minute and saves the week more often than a Friday one.
• Read Thursday adherence by meal, not by dayLook at which eating occasion is slipping. Breakfast holding while dinner fails is a cooking window problem; dinner holding while breakfast fails is a morning routine problem.
• Revise the plan, never restart itChange the two or three meals that failed and keep everything that worked. Rebuilding from scratch tells her the last week was wasted and doubles your production time.
• Document adherence in the clinical noteRecord the specifics in the objective section: which meals held, which slipped and what she reported instead. It supports the follow up visit and it is what you will need if anyone reviews the file.
• Decide next Sunday's plan from this week's dataKeep the meals with the highest completion, cut the ones she skipped twice, and change one thing at a time. Week two is where retention is won or lost.