Meal prepping can help you reach and maintain a healthy weight and ensure you are getting the necessary nutrients to keep you productive and clear-minded. However, learning how to meal prep effectively is a trial and error exercise. Here are our top four tips for making healthy prep easier:
- Forget Perfection
Regardless of how you feel about cooking, meal prepping needs to fit into your life and work for you. For example, you may prefer to prepare complete dishes or simply cook up your carbs and protein for the week and leave the sauces and other specific components of the meal for on-the-day. It’s no use dreading that one day a week., so meal prep to the degree that suits you.
Whatever your approach, the idea is to minimize your time in the kitchen by keeping it simple. Freezing away fruit for a morning smoothie, baking your own artisan bread, and pre-cooking sauces are great starting points if you want to transition into this lifestyle slowly.
- Get Kitted In The Kitchen
It’s always such a delight to pull out a good quality set of cookware to prepare your food. When you’re preparing all of your meals for the next few days in a single cooking session, that joy is multiplied. Though you may be in lockdown at the moment, you can find great quality cookware sets online. The ideal set should help you to unleash your ultimately creative foodie by making you feel excited about the prospect of cooking. If you don’t feel this way, it’s definitely time for a new set.
- Prepped Meals Don’t Have To Be Prepacked
One aspect that leaves many people skeptical as to whether meal prepping is going to work for them is the idea of pre-deciding what they’re going to eat all week. It sounds boring. What if you simply don’t feel like pasta on Wednesday for lunch? Well, you don’t have to pre-pack your lunch. If you are preparing food for three or four days in advance, you can store it in the refrigerator in containers – not dished up.
So, you can have a container of rice, a container of pasta, a container of vegetables, and whatever other options you plan to have. This means you can decide in the morning what you feel like and dish it up into your lunchbox. For many people, having a meal pre-packed in a lunchbox is a convenience more than a pleasure – if you have the time to dish up before your day starts, you might prefer to decide each morning what you will be having later that day for lunch.
- Include Variety
The same meal day-in and day-out could drive anyone to madness, especially if you’re trying to keep it healthy. Variety is your best friend when it comes to healthy eating. If you’re following a nutritional plan, pick out five carbohydrate sources, and have a different one for each day of the week. Keep the labor to a minimum by preparing greater volumes. Just make sure you know precisely how long each food will be good in the fridge so you don’t end up wasting anything you’ve prepped.
The Benefits Of Meal Prepping
Doing this each week will leave you with decent storage of frozen meals and a wonderful variety to choose from. Having a back-up supply of meals will also come in handy when you have a busy week and you’re unable to meal prep, helping you to stay healthy and avoid fast-food convenience.
