Meal Prep 101
These days, we as a nation are becoming smarter about our food choices. With access to the internet and other publications, there are so many great resources for health minded folks like yourselves.
However, knowing is only half the battle, right? Execution is the other half. And many of us still face problems choosing healthy alternatives for our daily meals.
Sometimes, when you lead a busy life, it’s not always easy to make healthy choices. Let’s face it we all lead somewhat busy lives in one way or another. That’s what make’s meal prepping so great!
What Is Meal Prepping?
Meal Prepping is simply preparing some, or all of your meals ahead of time.
It’s like having those ready-made meals that you would purchase from the store, except that you prepare them yourself, with better, healthier and unprocessed ingredients.
Not only does it save you time, but it also helps to ensure you eat healthier foods more often with the proper portions, instead of reaching for quick processed meals and prepackaged snacks that go over your caloric needs.
The idea is that when you have healthier things ready to eat, you will eat them instead of other potentially damaging foods.
How To Get Started?
It’s important to remember to not get overwhelmed when you are a beginner. Too often people get bogged down in details. So, stick to the basics and you’ll be fine.
Don’t try to incorporate too many new things at once. For example, don’t try meal prepping with all new healthy recipes. Start prepping with recipes that you are already familiar with. When you feel comfortable, gradually add more.
You see people go on ‘health-kicks’ all the time, and what happens? They give up and thrown in the towel quickly because they add too many new things at once. For example, they decide to start a salad-only diet, or they cut out sugar or dairy products cold turkey, or they start going to the gym every day when they haven’t been in years. They do this all in the first week and get burned out very easily.
It doesn’t work like that. You must start small. Same goes for Meal Prepping.
Pick A Day
The first thing you should do is pick a day to prepare all your meals. For most, Sunday is the best day because it’s a day when you are off work, family and friends are home and you can enlist their help if you need it.
More experienced meal preppers seem to like Sunday and Wednesday as their chosen days to cook and prepare meals for the week. Using these two days allows them to split up the week’s prepping into two days.
In the beginning though, you don’t want to prepare meals for the whole week. You want to start off with no more than three meals so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
2. Pick Your Meals
You will need to decide which meal you are going to prepare first: Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner. If you are preparing for a family, then prepping your dinner meals seems to be where you would get the most from your efforts. However, if you are single, or cooking for one or two people, then you may want to try to prepare breakfast or lunch meals first.
Ultimately, the choice is yours. You just want to think about it a little before you get started. After that, you want to decide on the recipes you are going to prepare.
You might not want to cook the same recipe for all three meals, although you can. But if you choose to prepare three dinner meals for your family, and they are all the same recipe, you might have a bit of a fight on your hands. You can still incorporate the same (or similar) ingredients for three different meals and keep everyone happy.
3. Use Proper Containers
You must use the proper containers! I really can’t stress this enough. Good storage containers are really the foundation of your meal prepping. How you choose to store your meals can make or break your meal prepping efforts. You don’t want to simply throw everything into Tupperware bowls. That defeats the whole point of preparing things.Throw it all in one big box and what you’ll have is a pile of goop. Some people can eat like that (my husband in particular). He can just put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix it up and viola, dinner. Not me, so what you’ll need are container that are airtight, with divided sections that are also airtight. This feature alone makes for better, fresher, crispier tasting meals. Ideally, they should also be made of glass, or at least BPA free plastic.
If you’re going to be reheating these meals, we should keep it as safe and free of chemicals as possible. Put simply, you want containers that are:
BPA Free
Freezer Safe
Dishwasher Safe
Microwavable
Stackable
Reusable
In The Kitchen
Once again, start off with just a few meals with a few ingredients.
Don’t try to cook a whole week’s worth of meals in one sitting. You may want to do this later, as you get more comfortable, but for now, just try to find your meal-prepping-groove.
Focus on simple meals. Chicken is a favorite among many meal preppers because it can be cooked in a seemingly endless number of ways. It’s also easy to store and freeze. With just a bit of chicken, some great seasonings or sauces, and a few vegetables you can easily prepare three totally different meals.
For vegetarians or vegans, you can use beans, legumes, or hearty root veggies to act as the protein component in these prepped meals.
Learn To Multi-task
Remember that you can cook lots of different things at the same time. Use your oven space to its fullest potential. There’s no need to place one thing in there at a time. Use multiple oven trays if it helps or use aluminum foil to make dividers on one oven tray and multiply your efforts.
Start with recipes that lend themselves to this type of batch cooking. When planning your first shopping trip as a meal prepper, ask yourself if you have enough oven trays, aluminum foil and other utensils you might need in addition to the groceries on the list.
In addition, you can always pull out and dust off that crockpot you haven’t used in years too. They are great for soups, stews, chicken curry, and other meals that can be stored and eaten later. I’m not going to try to tell you how to cook your meals, to each his own. You can find tons of recipes online as well as other tips and tricks from the experts.
Hopefully this guide has given all you need to get started with meal prepping so you can make life a little easier. After all, that’s what meal prepping is all about.