7-Day Low FODMAP Meal Plan (Elimination Phase)

Michael Eisenwasser 9 min read

The hardest part of the elimination phase isn't willpower. It's the 6pm moment when you open the fridge, realize half of what's in there is off-limits, and order takeout you'll regret two hours later. A meal plan fixes that problem more effectively than any pep talk.

This is a 7-day plan built for the strict part of the diet. Every meal uses foods Monash lists as low FODMAP at the portion given, the portions are written in numbers you can actually measure, and the ingredient list repeats enough that one grocery run covers the week. Repetition is the feature, not the bug.

How to read this plan

A few ground rules before the table.

Portions matter more than foods. A food is only low FODMAP at a specific serve. Avocado is low at 30 grams (about an eighth of a medium fruit) and moves into moderate and then high fast. Sweet potato is low at 75 grams, broccoli heads are low at 75 grams but the stalks are only safe at around 45 grams. The Monash app has the current cutoffs, check it when a portion in this plan looks different from what you'd normally serve yourself.

Watch your stacking. FODMAPs from different foods add up within a meal and across a day. Three technically green servings on one plate can still push you over threshold, especially when they share a FODMAP group (several fructan sources, several polyol sources). The plan below is designed to spread groups across the day, but if you swap a meal, double-check you haven't stacked two or three polyol fruits in one sitting.

Garlic-infused oil is your base fat. Every savory dinner below assumes you're cooking in a strained garlic-infused olive oil (no solids floating in it). See the garlic post for why this works and which brands are Monash-certified.

No onion, no garlic. Read labels on stocks, sauces, and seasoning blends. Onion and garlic powder hide in roughly every packaged product. See the onion post for the scallion- and leek-green substitutes that actually work.

Lactose-free, not dairy-free. Lactose-free milk, lactose-free yogurt, and hard cheeses (cheddar, parmesan, brie) are fine. You don't need to avoid all dairy, just the lactose.

The 7-day plan

Day	Breakfast	Lunch	Dinner	Snack
Mon	Oatmeal (½ cup rolled oats) with lactose-free milk, ¼ cup blueberries, 10 walnuts	Rice bowl: ½ cup cooked rice, 120 g grilled chicken, 75 g roasted carrot, spinach, olive oil, lemon	Pan-seared salmon (150 g) with 75 g roasted sweet potato and 75 g steamed green beans, garlic-infused oil	1 medium firm banana (unripe) with 1 tbsp peanut butter
Tue	2 eggs scrambled with scallion greens and 30 g cheddar on 2 slices sourdough (spelt or wheat)	Leftover salmon flaked over 2 cups spinach, 30 g feta, cucumber, olive oil + lemon	Stir-fry: 120 g firm tofu, 75 g bok choy, 45 g broccoli florets, ½ cup rice, garlic-infused oil, soy sauce, scallion greens	15 almonds + 1 small kiwi
Wed	Lactose-free yogurt (¾ cup) with ¼ cup strawberries and 1 tbsp pumpkin seeds	Turkey and cheddar sandwich on 2 slices sourdough, butter lettuce, cucumber, mustard	Roast chicken thighs (150 g) with 75 g mashed potato and 75 g roasted zucchini, chives	Rice cakes (2) with 2 tbsp smooth peanut butter
Thu	Smoothie: 1 cup lactose-free milk, 1 small banana, ¼ cup blueberries, 1 tbsp chia, 1 tbsp peanut butter	Leftover roast chicken over quinoa (½ cup cooked), 75 g roasted carrot, spinach, olive oil + lemon	Beef stir-fry: 120 g sirloin, 75 g red bell pepper, 75 g bok choy, ½ cup rice noodles, garlic-infused oil, ginger, scallion greens	1 small orange + 30 g cheddar
Fri	2 eggs over-easy with 2 slices gluten-free toast and ½ medium tomato	Tuna salad (1 can tuna, 2 tbsp mayo, chives) over butter lettuce with cucumber, 10 rice crackers	Baked cod (150 g) with 75 g roasted potato and 75 g steamed spinach, garlic-infused oil, lemon	Lactose-free yogurt (¾ cup) with 1 tbsp maple syrup
Sat	Oat pancakes (½ cup rolled oats, 1 egg, lactose-free milk, cinnamon) with ¼ cup strawberries and 1 tbsp maple syrup	Quinoa bowl: ½ cup quinoa, ¼ cup canned rinsed chickpeas, cucumber, 30 g feta, olive oil, lemon, chives	Grilled chicken (150 g) with 75 g roasted eggplant and 75 g zucchini, garlic-infused oil, parmesan	1 medium firm banana + 10 walnuts
Sun	Omelet (2 eggs) with 30 g cheddar, scallion greens, ½ medium tomato, 2 slices sourdough	Leftover grilled chicken on 2 cups spinach, 75 g roasted carrot, cucumber, olive oil + lemon	Roast pork tenderloin (150 g) with 75 g roasted parsnip and 75 g steamed green beans, rosemary, garlic-infused oil	1 small kiwi + 15 almonds

Every portion above is at or under the Monash green-serve cutoff at the time of writing. Apps update and Monash occasionally retests foods, so cross-check anything that looks unfamiliar against your current Monash app entry before you cook.

Why the portions look small

A few items in the table will look smaller than your default serving. That's the diet working correctly, not a typo.

Canned rinsed chickpeas are low FODMAP at ¼ cup. A full cup isn't. Rinsing matters, the liquid carries GOS. Dried chickpeas cooked from scratch behave differently and are generally higher at typical serves; check the app if you're not using canned.
Broccoli florets are low FODMAP at 75 grams. Stalks are lower, around 45 grams, because fructan concentrates in the stem.
Avocado is low at 30 grams (about an eighth of a medium fruit). A half avocado is a reintroduction-phase serving.
Almonds are low at about 10 nuts (roughly 15 grams). A generous handful is already into amber territory.
Sweet potato is low at 75 grams. A whole baked sweet potato is usually 150 grams or more.
Firm bananas (unripe, still-green-ish) are low FODMAP at one medium fruit. Ripe bananas with brown spots have higher fructans and the serve drops to ⅓ of a medium.

These aren't arbitrary. Monash set the thresholds by testing foods in a lab and finding the portion below which most people with IBS don't react. Eating double the listed serve is the most common reason an otherwise careful elimination-phase meal triggers symptoms.

Don't stack across the day

The plan above is written so you're not loading the same FODMAP group into every meal. A few rules that shaped it, worth remembering if you swap things around.

One polyol fruit per day, spaced out. Blueberries, strawberries, kiwi, oranges, and firm bananas have different dominant FODMAPs, but polyols (sorbitol, mannitol) sneak up fast if you pile stone fruit and mushrooms on top of them. The plan gives you one polyol-leaning fruit per day and doesn't double-dip.

Go easy on same-group stacking. Don't put avocado, sweet potato, and canned chickpeas in the same meal, each is fine alone at a small serve, but together you're stacking GOS. If you move one of the lunches, glance down the ingredient list and check you haven't created a same-group pile-up. See the stacking post for worked examples.

Space meals by two to three hours when you can. FODMAPs take time to clear the small intestine. Grazing continuously means loads overlap in your gut even when each individual meal was clean. Three meals plus one snack is easier to keep clean than six small meals.

The Monash app is authoritative for borderline calls. When you're unsure about a food, a brand, or a portion, and you'll be unsure often in the first two weeks, the Monash FODMAP app is the reference Monash recommends. Online lists and free apps lose accuracy as Monash retests foods. Pay for the Monash app once and you'll save yourself a week of guessing.

Grocery list pointer

A meal plan is only as useful as the shopping trip that precedes it. Before Monday morning, make one grocery run that covers the repeating staples in the table above: rolled oats, rice, quinoa, spelt or gluten-free sourdough, lactose-free milk and yogurt, cheddar and parmesan and feta, eggs, chicken thighs, salmon, cod, beef sirloin, pork tenderloin, firm tofu, the fruits and vegetables listed in the low-FODMAP fruit list and low-FODMAP vegetable list, and one bottle each of strained garlic-infused olive oil and regular olive oil. Batch-roast a tray of carrots, zucchini, and sweet potato on Sunday afternoon and three of the weeknight dinners above come together in 15 minutes.

Keep sauces simple and brand-certified: plain soy sauce, Dijon mustard, lemon, olive oil, maple syrup, salt, pepper, and dried herbs do most of the work. The trap most people hit in week one is buying an "IBS-friendly" sauce that quietly contains onion powder. Read every label, or stick to single-ingredient seasonings.

Recipes to build from

The table above is deliberately plain. Once you've got a few days of symptom-free cooking under your belt, mix in meals you actually look forward to. Our low-FODMAP recipes section has dinners, breakfasts, and snacks built around the same safe-portion principles, every recipe cooks in garlic-infused oil and keeps portions inside Monash green-serve cutoffs. Three sauces cover most weeknight cooking: strained garlic-infused olive oil, a fructan-free marinara, and a low-FODMAP chicken broth.

Track what you eat

A meal plan tells you what to eat. Symptom tracking tells you whether it's working. You're running a two-variable experiment, the food going in, and the symptoms coming out, and memory alone isn't accurate enough to see the pattern.

A simple daily log of what you ate, rough portions, and a 0-to-10 symptom score for bloating, pain, gas, and bowel habits is enough to catch whether week two actually feels better than week one, and whether a specific meal combination is creeping you over threshold. This is what the FODMAP Tracker app is built for: it knows the FODMAP content of foods so you don't have to look them up, timestamps symptoms in real time, and graphs the two against each other so patterns surface within days rather than months.

The honest take

A meal plan won't make the first week easier. Week one is rough regardless of how tidy your spreadsheet is. What the plan does is remove the decision fatigue that drives most relapses, you don't have to figure out what's safe at 6pm, because you figured it out Sunday night at the grocery store.

Repeat the week above twice if it's working, then start experimenting with the recipes section once you've got a baseline. Three to four weeks of clean elimination is what produces a stable baseline you can then use for reintroduction. Boring and repetitive beats creative and chaotic every time.

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice. Consult a healthcare professional for personal guidance.

References

Low FODMAP Meal Plan — Monash FODMAP
Starting the Low FODMAP Diet — Monash FODMAP
The 3 phases of the low FODMAP diet — Monash FODMAP
Getting Started on the Low FODMAP Diet: Elimination Phase — A Little Bit Yummy
How To Make The Low FODMAP Diet Elimination Phase Easier To Follow — FODMAP Everyday
Low FODMAP 7 Day Meal Plan — Australian Eggs (APD-developed)