Meal Plans Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
If you don't see your question answered, please reach out to us.
Plant Fueled Meal Plans 101
There are three subscription options for the Meal Plans.
- Monthly Payment: The monthly cost is $25 USD. Your credit card will automatically be charged for renewal on the same day each month.
- Quarterly Payment: The quarterly cost is $60 USD ($20 / month). Your credit card will automatically be charged for renewal on the same day, three months after your sign-up date.
- Yearly Payment: The yearly cost is $216 USD ($18 / month). Your credit card will automatically be charged for renewal on the same day, one year after your sign-up date. We will send you a renewal notification 30 days before your annual renewal charge date.
You will get your first Meal Plan as soon as you sign up (the most recent Plan).
A new Meal Plan hits your classroom at 12:01 Am every Friday.
Absolutely, yes!
Head over to this page and sign up for a free trial - easy peasy!
Whether you are brand new to the Meal Plans or a seasoned Dirty, head over to here to sign up! Returning Dirties: as long as you use the same email address as before, your past plans will reactivate.
* If you’d like to use a different email address, first sign up with your new email address and then email us [email protected] and let us know you would like your accounts merged.
All of our recipes and Meal Plans are Whole Food Plant Based, free of meat, dairy, poultry, seafood, eggs, refined sugar, refined flour and oil. The focus is on veggies, legumes, whole grains, fruit, nuts, and seeds. Occasionally we will use minimally processed foods, like sprouted bread or tofu. We occasionally use (optional) maple syrup or coconut sugar in small amounts as sweetener.
Each Meal Plan in your classroom contains the following:
- Menu at a Glance
- Meal Plan Notes and Tips
- Detailed Grocery List with interactive checklist
- Detailed Prep Instructions for Batch Day with interactive checklist
- Batch Cooking Recipes (usually 8 or 9 recipes that you will make on your batching day)
- Nightly Meal Instructions (instructions for 5 delicious and fast meals using items that you made on your batch cooking day)
- Nightly Meal photos
- Downloadable/Printable PDF of your entire weekly Meal Plan or just the parts you want to download
The Meal Plan classroom allows you to select how many portions of each meal you want to make and then everything is calculated and displayed for you - from the grocery list to the batching recipes.
Nope, just dinners Monday through Friday.
That said, Meal Plan leftovers are perfect for lunch, so you can scale up the portions of your meals, and lunches will be taken care of.
You can definitely do this! Making the free recipes from the blog is a great way to dip your feet in the yummy plant based waters. When you’re ready for a structured plan and just want to follow along each week, we got you!
Nope - this is not a diet at all. This is about the quality of the food you eat, not the quantity. Following the Meal Plans will help you embrace eating whole plant foods as the foundation of your nutrition each day and, over time, fueling on mostly whole plants can lead to major lifestyle changes. Many of our members have experienced gradual weight loss in a sustainable manner.
While the Meal Plans are not designed for weight loss (or gain), most people who have weight to lose find that eating a whole food plant based diet consistently over time helps them lose weight in a gradual and sustainable way.
The short answer is no. Check out this blog post about why we keep the focus of the Meal Plans away from dieting and calorie / nutrient counting. This one touches on the abusive nature of dieting.
And this one explains why the plans are not about weight loss (or weight gain).
This way of eating is about fueling with nutrient dense foods and learning to recognize true hunger so you can fuel as you need. Eat when you’re hungry and stop eating when you are no longer hungry and before you feel full in your stomach.
If you’re always really full after a meal, add a quarter less to your plate the next time you eat, and see how you feel. If you’re not feeling full enough after you eat, add a quarter more to your plate the next time you eat, and see how you feel.
This is all about getting in tune with your natural hunger signals and your miraculous body.
It depends on your kiddo, but we have lots of people report that the Meal Plans are kid friendly. Some things they will like. Some things they won’t. If they don’t like four things in a row, maybe they will like the fifth thing you give them.
Keep trying and don’t give up! Getting your babes to eat healthy plant foods from the get-go is one of the best things you can do for them! Here's an awesome interview with Dr. Yami, a plant-based pediatrician.
In most cases, absolutely! Our recipes and Meal Plans contain a wide range of unprocessed whole plant foods and the recipes are forgiving and versatile. If you have food allergies or sensitivities or other dietary restrictions, a little creativity is all you need.
Between our handy dandy substitution guide and our private Facebook group you should have no trouble finding good substitutions.
Our Meal Plans take the planning - from what to cook, what to buy, and how to prepare it - out of your weekly routine. We also focus on nutrient diversity so that you get a wide range of nutrients each and every week.
Even if you eat healthy, these plans will make your life easier and keep you from getting into a food rut.
You will get the Meal Plans that come out while you are signed up, not the Plans that came out before you signed up.
As long as you are a current Meal Plan subscriber you can purchase any of our past Meal Plans in the classroom for $10 each.
We ask that you please do not share the Meal Plans (or the recipes in them). We put a tremendous amount of work into hand crafting our recipes and Meal Plans each week, and this is what keeps our business running and our employees paid. Sharing paid content is a violation of our intellectual property. If you want to share recipes with your peeps, please share the free recipes from our blog.
We do, however, encourage sharing the food that you make from the Meal Plans. That is A-OK! If someone loves it and asks for the recipe, send them to our Meal Plan page where they can sign up for a free trial to our classroom and make some yummy noms!
We are working on that and should have it done by the end of 2019.
Groceries and Kitchen
We have people from all over the world who get our Meal Plans, including Australia, United Kingdom, Cyprus, Cayman Islands, Virgin Islands, Ireland, Canada, Finland, Germany, South Africa, New Zealand, Singapore, Netherlands, Dubai, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Malaysia and more.
It might take a little creativity and the recipes and meals won’t be exactly as they are written, but you can make it work and they will still be yummy.
Check out our substitution document if you are having trouble finding a particular ingredient. This document also includes a tab for global names of ingredients that are commonly used in our Meal Plans.
If there is a health food store in your town you will be fine, even if it is a small health food store. If there is a regular grocery store in your town, that works too. If you cannot find a particular ingredient, you can always order it online or check out our substitution document for alternate options. Bottom line – you can make it work if you live in a small town.
This all depends on where you live. People who live in Canada pay far more for groceries than we do here in the U.S. If you are brand new to this way of eating, your first three Meal Plan grocery store trips will be more than you usually spend. However, once your kitchen is stocked with staple ingredients, you will save money each week on groceries because you will only buy what you need and you won’t waste ingredients.
You will also save money throughout the week because you won’t be eating out or relying on packaged food. Cooking healthy plant based food from scratch is always more cost effective than going out to eat or buying packaged meals. From what we’ve heard from our Meal Planners, the first few trips to the grocery store for a family of four is usually around $100 – $120 (USD).
After the first three Meal Plans, groceries are anywhere from $6 a week to $50 a week. We’ve seen many people save literally hundreds of dollars a month on food by using these plans. So the initial cost of getting your kitchen stocked is worth it because it gets cheaper the longer you do it, and the cost of the Meal Plan subscription will pay for itself over and over.
If you have some skillets, pots, pans, a cutting board, a sharp knife, a blender, some baking sheets, some mixing bowls and a salad spinner you can knock out the Meal Plans.
If you have an Instant Pot (or other electric or stove top pressure cooker) and a food processor, you will knock them out faster and easier. Bottom line – the recipes don’t need fancy equipment.
Below are two posts that go over the kitchen essentials.
This depends on how experienced and comfortable you are in the kitchen. If you’re familiar with cooking and batching, it will take you between 2 and 4 hours. If you’re not experienced, it will take you longer. That said, you will get faster the more you do it.
Keep in mind that the time you spend in the kitchen batching is time you will not spend in your kitchen throughout the week.
Here are two posts about helping you shave time off your batch cooking sessions.
Part One - Batch Cooking Shortcuts
Technical
In your customizable private classroom.
The Meal Plans are accessed through a virtual interface, so you can live anywhere in the world and have access to them. All you need is a computer and internet connection.
Our release schedule is based on Pacific Standard Time. A new Meal Plan opens every Friday at 12:01 AM Pacific Standard Time (PST). That means if you live in New Zealand, your Meal Plan will release around 7:30 AM each Saturday morning (also, daylight savings time might come into play too!).
Yes, indeed! They work great on tablets, ipads and phones.
If you are a Meal Plan subscriber or have purchased Lighten Up, it is super important that the email address you give us delivers our emails to you.
Email delivery is a moving target. If you are expecting email from us that hasn't arrived, or, you read our emails and all of a sudden they've stopped arriving, check out our guide to the various email providers and suggestions that may solve the issue.
If you go through this list and you are still not receiving email from us, please reach out, we are glad to help. [email protected]
GENERAL ADVICE
Inbox Search: It's always a good idea to search of your inbox (including Spam or Junk folders) to see if our email filtered to a folder you weren't expecting. Simply search for our email address: [email protected].
Add Us As a Contact: Add our email address: Molly Patrick | [email protected] to the Contact / Approved Senders List in your Inbox.
Hard Bounce: Every week we have people who request the Trial Meal Plan or join our Saturday Fuckery and we cannot send them email because there is a typo entered in the email address. Take care to enter your correct email address.
Work Email: Corporate or institutional email addresses are often problematic. If you signed up for the Meal Plans or the Saturday Fuckery using a work email address and are not receiving our content, email us ([email protected]) with a personal email address and we are glad to switch your profile over to use that one instead.
GMAIL
Our experience has been that Gmail has the best delivery rates.
- Gmail may deliver our emails to the "Promotions" tab. You can click and drag an email from Promotions to the "Inbox" tab and Gmail will know to deliver our emails there from then on out.
- If you are not seeing an email from us that you are expecting, check the Promotions tab or search your inbox for our email address: [email protected]
HOTMAIL, LIVE MAIL, MSN, OUTLOOK
These providers may require that you authorize our domain for email delivery.
Please follow these steps:
- Go to https://outlook.live.com
- Sign into your account and click on the "Settings" cogwheel in the top right of the screen
- From the list, click on "Options"
- From the list of options, under Junk Email, select "Safe Senders"
- Into the field marked "Enter a sender or domain here", enter the domain name cleanfooddirtygirl.com and click on the plus icon
- To save, click on the "Save" icon to save the settings
COMCAST
- Adjust your Spam Filter on your Comcast account. It seems that for many accounts Comcast sets the Spam Filter, by default, turned ON. This automatically deletes anything that Comcast *thinks* is spam without giving you the opportunity to view the email. You want to turn this OFF. Read this link for information on how to turn off that filter.
- If that option doesn’t work for you, we suggest switching your email address on file with us to another provider. Contact us at [email protected]