Meal Prep like a Pro

Introduction

Meal prepping is a powerful tool that can transform the way you approach food, helping you save time, money, and make healthier choices. In this guide, we'll explore the benefits of meal prep, provide a step-by-step guide, and share valuable tips to make your meal prep journey successful.

It is important to remember why you are actually meal prepping. For many of us, the real reason to meal prep is to make sure we are getting adequate nutrition in our daily meals. Better nutrition, very often leads to an organic loss in body fat because the body is operating to its full potential now that it has all the nutrients needed, even when eating more calories than you thought possible. 

Benefits of Meal Prep

1. Time Efficiency

Let's be honest, time is one of the biggest factors when it comes to maintaining a high quality diet that matches your goals for a lifetime. Learn how to save time with batch cooking and raw prep. Try cutting and peeling your potatoes or other vegetables to make them easy to add to any meal.  Discover the art of bulk or batch cooking for staples like rice, beans, potatoes, and proteins. Explore the world of frozen fruits, veggies, and proteins for convenient and healthy options.

2. Quality Grab and Go Snacks

Enhance the quality of your grab-and-go snacks by incorporating nutritious ingredients. Foods like nuts, fruits, and vegetables can make fueling on the go easy and useful. Consider a high quality insulated bag to help keep premade meals and snacks like cheese and hard boiled eggs easy to transport and keep cold. 

3. Kitchen Assessment

Conduct a thorough assessment of your kitchen to set yourself up for success. Identify essential tools, assess space, and take inventory of ingredients and supplies. Some kitchen gadgets give a much greater bang for your buck. A multi purpose gadget like a ninja foodie may be worth the investment to save space and cost on multiple other appliances and pots or pans. On the other hand, if you are someone who loves to cook and create endless textures and flavors in your meals, more equipment might be right up your alley. 

Guide to Meal Prep

1. Planning

Plan your meals for a set period, typically 3-6 days. Determine the number of meals needed and create a targeted shopping list to save time and money. We want you to reduce the amount of bandwidth you need to use and also reduce the amount of waste you have and limit how much time you actually need to spend cooking. 

2. Shopping Strategies

Explore effective shopping strategies, such as shopping the perimeter of the store to resist temptations of all the “extras”.  An “out of sight out of mind" approach can help you to stay on target. You can often save money at the market by buying bulk items that you use on a regular basis. 

3. Meal Variety

Consider the number of people you need to feed and how much variety is essential for you. Strike a balance between meal repetition and culinary exploration. Trying new foods is important to keep yourself getting a variety of nutrients in your diet, but it's not necessary to have every single meal of the week be different.  Simple meals can offer a lot of satiety and satisfaction. 

Meal Prep Tools

1. Essential Tools

Identifying your essential meal prep tools, including crockpots, Instant Pots, microwaves, and quality containers make every part of meal prep easier.  Anytime we can streamline your meal prep process it's a good thing. The easier the process, the more likely you are to do it. Repetition will help build the habit and keep the habit. This way, meal prep can become part of your lifestyle and not just a phase.  Using multiple tools at once is a sneaky way to get more done at one time. Roasting potatoes while you use a crockpot to create a chili and an instapot to cook rice can be prepping vegetables or sauteing meat. I do suggest the investment in timers and alarms, even if it's just your phone. 

2. Transportation and Reheating

Discuss preferred ways to transport meals and reheating options. Address challenges like keeping meals cold, and share tips for maintaining flavor and texture during reheating.

Remember that keeping your meals properly cooled and getting it heated as needed is part of the meal prep equation that can be one of the harder challenges. When you make your meal plan, think about which meals match best with your needs. Do you have to travel to work? Do you stop at the gym or other location before you get to a refrigerator? Is there a place where you can heat up your food? Do you need to bring utensils? If you work from home, do you have time to heat your food up in a pan or should you plan to just use the microwave to save time?

Overcoming Meal Prep Challenges

1. Identifying Challenges

Explore common challenges like time constraints, energy levels, bandwidth, and hunger. Understand how these factors may impact your ability to meal prep effectively.

Meal prep and planning exists on a spectrum and finding where your best fit is the key to success for the kind of tool. When are you actually going to do all the cooking? Are you going to batch in one day or are you going to make extra for lunch or dinner each day? Is simply having a big batch of roasted potatoes enough to keep your meals and macro needs on track or should you consider making entire meals. 

2. Simplifying the Process

Adopt the K.I.S.S principle – Keep it Super Simple. Simplify your meal prep to eliminate decision fatigue and make the process more sustainable.  More isn't always better, if meal prep feels like just another task it might not be a good fit for you.  If you can see the time it saves or the way it helps you reach your macros or body composition goals, it may be a tool worth spending time learning how to use well. 

Personal Experiences and Tips

Whenever possible, community. In all things in this life, especially new health and fitness habits, it's vital to establish a community that supports you. Even a coworker who smells your lunch and asks for the recipe is enough to create a conversation around meal prep. Conversations lead to new ideas, new recipes and new perspectives. And who knows maybe you will be the person who helped another get started on their own health and wellness journey 

Conclusion

In conclusion, meal prepping is a powerful tool that can revolutionize your approach to food. By following this guide, you'll be equipped to find a version of meal prep that works best for you, save time and money, and make healthier choices and a better life!