6 Best Free Meal Planning Software for Windows

Here is a list of best free meal planning software for Windows. These software make the task of creating meal plans really easy. Basically, you get a predefined structure where you need to add various recipes and foods to meal time (breakfast, lunch, etc.) to plan meals. Similarly, you can make meal plans for a whole week or month. Apart from meal planning, most of these software can also count calorie, fat, and protein intakes to track your progress. These meal planner software come with lots of predefined foods and recipes. Still, they also provide the option to add new foods and recipes. With every new food, you need to enter various parameters of that new food like fat, sodium, sugar, protein, etc.

In this list of meal planner software, you can view some body building software, diet software, calorie counter software, etc. All of them provide a good meal planning feature. The body building software estimate the amount of protein, carbs, and fat required by you to meet the target. Diet software use meal planning function to control the food intake. Calorie counter software provide the exact count of calorie, protein, fat, etc. Meal planning is an essential part of various types of software, which shows in how many different areas meal planning is used.

My Favorite meal planning software for Windows:

Macro Meal Planner is my favorite meal planner software because it provides the most interactive and easy to use interface. Its drag and drop feature to add food in different meal times section makes meal planning easy.

You can also check out the list of best free Diabetes Management Software and Personal Trainer Software for Windows.

Macro Meal Planner

Macro Meal Planner is a free meal planning app for Windows 10. It is a simple and interactive meal planning as well as diet planning software.

In this meal planner, you can add meals according to date which comes in handy while planning meals for future dates. Before planning meals, you need to enter food items. Press Add Food button to start adding food. Enter various food details, namely, food name, its measure, calories, protein, fat, carbs, and sodium, and save the details.

You can add as many food items as you want in this meal planner. Now all the added food items can be viewed in the food section. Just drag and drop food items from food section to breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack sections to plan meals.

For different meal time, the measure of a food item can be varied in different meal sections (breakfast, dinner, etc.). Complete details of how much fat, calorie, protein, carbs, and sodium contained in a single meal can be viewed on the interface. Overall it is one of the simplest free meal planner software.

EasyMenu Balanced Meal Planner

EasyMenu Balanced Meal Planner is another free meal planning app for Windows 10. It will help you to plan meals as well in preparing the list of shopping items. Plus, you can plan breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner menus of the whole week. It has lots of predefined dishes with a list of all the ingredients used in those dishes. You can only make meals using a predefined list of dishes because there is no option to add new dishes.

To plan meals, you need to go to add menu section. In this section, an empty weekly meal chart is present. Select any day of the week and start adding meal menus by clicking on the respective meal time (breakfast, lunch, or dinner). You can also leave the meal menu empty. In that case, this software automatically select the random dishes for you.

After planning the meals, you can also plan the ingredients that you want for the weekly menu by going to shopping list menu. Here, you can find a list of all ingredients that will be used to make the planned dishes. You can add or remove any ingredient, if needed.

This food planner also has a summary menu. Summary menu contains average daily nutrients and fat intakes in form of a pie chart. Plus, a daily calories intake of the whole week is also available in form of bar graph.

In the nutshell, it is a multipurpose food planning software that takes care of meals, shopping, as well as calorie and nutrients intake.

MuscleLite

MuscleLite is a free meal planning software for Windows. Through it, you can estimate your energy intake as well as plan your meals. For bodybuilders, it is an ideal software as they can balance their protein and carbs intakes using this meal planner. Here, you get lots of predefined food items using which you can create a balanced meal. But, you are not allowed to add any new custom food. This software is basically divided into two sections named MuscleCalc and MealPlanner.

Through Meal Planner section, you can plan up to six meals a day. For each meal, you can select three different food items. But, it is compulsory to select one protein source and one carbohydrate source. The third food item is not compulsory so you can choose any food item. After selecting the meals, press create button. All the selected meal combination will appear on the meal plan section. The list of planned meals can also be printed or saved in OXPS format.

MuscleCalc section helps you to calculate the energy intake. Here, you get two calc functions named A.I. and user. If you select A.I. mode, then you need to select or enter various parameters like gender, objective (fat gain or loss), Metabolism (slow, fast, normal), and data (age, weight, height, body fat). It calculates the entered parameters and provides the macro result. Macro result shows how much fat, protein, carbs, and energy you need to achieve your target. On the other hand, user mode is simple and does not require many parameters to calculate energy intake. Instead, you just need to enter protein and caloric values you wanted from your food and hit calculate button to get macro composition. Besides macro composition, an energy breakdown list is also available in both A.I. and user. This list shows the percentage of protein, carbs, and fat that should be in your meal.

Camping Food Planner

Camping Food Planner is another free meal planning software for Windows. It is mainly used to plan meals for a trip or journey. In this software, you can plan meals for different days of a trip, for individual persons, and for a group of persons. Here, you need to enter details like duration of trip, number of travelers, and the meal you want and when you want them. According to entered details, you will get the whole meal plan for your trip.

On the upper part of interface, you get various tabs named ingredients, menu items, meals, and people. In ingredients tab, you get a lot of predefined ingredients like apple, cake mix, bacon, etc. You can also add new ingredients if you want. Menu items tab contains all menus that can be apart of the meals. At any time, you can edit and add ingredients of menu. Meals tab is used to plan meals by combining various menu items to prepare a complete meal. People tab allows you to edit, add, or delete travelers.

In order to plan the whole trip, you need to press trip wizard button. Through trip wizard, you can plan the whole trip in three simple steps, which are:

1. Assign a trip name, duration of the trip,  and location of the trip.
2. From the list of peoples, choose those who will be going on the trip.
3. Setup meal stops like breakfast, lunch, afternoon break, dinner, etc.

After the setup, you can view the name of trip along with location and trip date on the main interface. This list now has the complete detail of the trip to help you while traveling. At any time, you can edit your list if things are not going as planned.

Calorie Balance

Calorie Balance is a free meal planning and calorie counter software for Windows. It provides over thirty thousand foods to plan meals.

To plan meals, select plan meal section from the toolbar. Plan meal section provides a calendar based interface that contains date and day at the top and meal time (breakfast, lunch, etc.) at the left side. At the right side, a food panel is present that contains all the predefined food items. Drag and drop food items on a particular day section of meal planner to make meal plans.

According to the planned meals, multiple day-wise pie charts will appear at bottom of meal planner section. In pie charts, you can view the percentage of fat, protein, starch, sugar, etc., present in a daily meal. Option to add new food, recipes, and meals manually are also available on the top of this section. Here, you also get the option to save meal plans as .cbm image format.

In this meal planner software, you can also find some handy tools in different sections named calorie count, Activity, Journal, and new activities. Let us see what these sections do in brief:

• Calorie Count: Here, you need to add meals, unit (grams, oz), and number of servings to get the amount of fat, calorie, protein, sugar, etc., contained in the meal.
• Activity: This section is used to calculate the energy burnt during exercise. Here, you need to enter the name of exercise, sets, raps, weight, and rest time. By analyzing provided parameters, it shows the amount of calories burnt during exercise.
• Journal: It helps to keep track of the progress made by you. In this journal, you need to enter your weight, body fat percentage, and other measurable parameters daily to accurately track your progress.
•  New activities: It is used to enter new exercise and how many calories this new exercise can burn.

In my opinion, it is a really good software that can help you improve your diet and fitness level.

eFit Calorie Counter

eFit Calorie Counter is another free calorie counter and meal planner software for Windows. It is a good software to track and plan calorie, fat, protein, and carbs intakes. Its calorie counter and meal planner feature almost work together, because it shows the calorie count of planned meals.

In this meal planner, you get ten thousand plus food entries to make various combinations of meals. If you still want to add new recipes, then you can also do that from planner section. From the planner section, you can select various foods and recipes and add them to different meal times (meal 1, meal2, meal3, and snacks). A complete count of protein, calorie, carbs, etc., of planned food is also provided by this section. On the top, you get date and time information; by changing the date you can plan meals for any other date.

In the shopping section of this software, you get a list of all ingredients which will be required to prepare meals. Provided list of ingredients makes up for the need to make a list of required ingredients. A calendar section is also available through which you can jump to any day to view the planned meals of that day.