Meal prepping has become increasingly popular in recent years and it’s not hard to understand why—it can save you time, money, and help you achieve your health goals. While it may feel daunting to prepare several days’ worth of food at once, the benefits of meal prepping are numerous and well worth the effort. Whether you’re a busy professional, looking to tighten your food budget, or you’re just trying to stick to a healthier lifestyle, meal prepping can be a game-changer. So let’s dive in and discover the many benefits of meal prepping as well as how you can get started this coming week!
To begin: the benefits!
- Save Time: You won’t need to spend your morning before work tossing together a lunch that probably won’t appease your appetite, especially if you didn’t give it much thought beforehand. On the other hand, if you’re someone who can’t help but go out for lunch, you’ll have the time you would have taken to go out to instead enjoy your lunch and take extra time for yourself.
- Save Money: Again, if you’re a person who habitually eats out, you’ll be saving yourself not only time but money. Meal prepping makes it easy to create a food budget and stick to it.
- It’s Easier to Make Healthier Choices: If you’ve already planned out your week with healthy meals you know you’ll enjoy, you won’t be tempted to toss it and head to your closest fast food chain. Especially if you give yourself some variety in your weekly plan.
- It Makes Staying on a Specific Diet Easier: If you’re trying to follow a specific diet plan, or if you have food restrictions, meal planning gives you full control of your eating habits and schedule outside of the home.
- Less Stress: Instead of rushing to pack a lunch before work (one you might not enjoy), imagine opening your fridge to perfectly preportioned and nutritious meals that are ready to go. Or on days when you might’ve once skipped lunch because you don’t have time to leave work, you’ll be prepared and can make eating a healthy meal your priority.
- You’ll Become a Better Cook: Practice really does make perfect! So if you’re someone who isn’t the most confident in your cooking skills, the best way to get better is to start. Find recipe bloggers who have step-by-step guides to the kind of foods you enjoy eating. After no time you’ll be able to experiment and might even want to come up with your own recipes!
Now that you’re convinced that meal planning is the way to go, here’s how we suggest getting started
- Gather Containers: Simple Tupperware is a great place to start, but if you’re wanting to get a little fancy there are plenty of unique options from mason and weck jars, to bento boxes, to meal-prep-specific sectioned containers.
- Plan Your Week: Find your recipes or get creative. An easy recipe equation is protein + grain + vegetables. A super easy and very customizable way to do this is by making rice bowls. Start with a flavor orientation or style of food you’re trying to emulate, prepare your ingredients, and toss everything together. We also suggest giving yourself a few different recipe options when you start planning. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut by eating the same thing 5 days in a row—that can also lead you to toss the food you’ve prepared for something new just so you’ve got variety. To avoid this, we suggest picking a few different recipes, both for meals and snacks, and alternating the days you eat them. It’s also important to remember that anything you plan. eating after 5 days should be frozen for food safety. Here is a chart from the FDA about proper food storage timeline.
- Shop for Ingredients: Start by going through your recipes and putting together your grocery list to figure out which store has everything you need. Be sure to add plenty of snackable things to you
- Get Cooking!
And as always, if you’re not too fond of the above steps, enlist the help of a personal assistant to plan, prep, and organize your week of meals and snacks. This is an especially great option if your reason for meal prepping is to save time. Once you and your assistant agree on your food preferences and flavor palate, they’ll be able to find and execute all kinds of recipes just for you.
So give it a shot today and see how quickly your life changes for the better!
