It’s not easy to make healthy food choices all the time. Life gets busy, and when you have a stressful day, stopping at the drive-thru on the way home sounds much better than spending the evening cooking. This is where meal prep comes in to save the day.

Benefits of Meal Prepping Save Time

How much time does food take up for you in a week? If you’re cooking every night, your evenings are pretty much hijacked by dinner. Imagine if instead of having to go home to cook every night you want to eat healthy, a healthy meal was waiting for you. What would you make time for? Maybe you would come to visit our gym in Medford after work, knowing that once you got home, all you would have to do is heat up some healthy food and relax the rest of the evening.

Save Money

The cost of food can really add up, particularly when you’re eating out all week. What if, instead of spending 10 dollars on lunch every day, you took that 50 dollars and used it to buy groceries for the whole week? Get three times the food for the same price when you take the time to meal prep every Sunday.

Save Energy

If you really think about it, it’s no wonder that people struggle to eat healthy. Every time you get hungry, you have to make a choice: what do I eat? This makes it all too easy to make unhealthy decisions out of convenience or desperation. When you meal prep, all of your food decisions are narrowed down to one day a week. When all your meals are all ready to go, it makes your choice as simple as taking a container out of the fridge and nuking it for a couple minutes.

Meal Prep Tips

Now that you know why you should meal prep, here’s how you do it.

Plan on Friday, Shop on Saturday, Cook on Sunday

Many people choose to write out their plan, grocery shop on Sunday, then go home and cook it all. This means that you are spending pretty much the entire day on meal prep, which makes it feel like an insurmountable task. Make it easier by breaking it to bite-sized chunks. Plan your meals on Friday, shop for ingredients on Saturday, then prep your meals on Sunday to make it more manageable.

Have a Formula

Everyone approaches meal prep differently. You might plan to eat the same thing for breakfast, the same thing for lunch, and the same thing for dinner, and feel content. Other people need more variety. Regardless, find a structure that works for you every week, and use that to make meal prep basically second nature.

Keep Recipes Simple and Meal-Prep Appropriate

You may be jonesing to try that souffle recipe, but that doesn’t mean you should try it for meal prep. First of all, that’s way too complicated, and you will never stay consistent with meal prep if you have to spend hours in the kitchen. Also, there’s no way a souffle is going to taste good after sitting in the fridge for two days. It’s best to keep meal prep recipes simple: something with minimal ingredients that you can prepare in under 30 minutes, and will taste good as leftovers. Egg bakes, casseroles, skillet dishes, soups, and sheet pan meals are all good examples.

At Fit in New England, we’re happy to support your healthy lifestyle in any way we can. If you’re looking for a personal trainer in Medford, we have a staff of experienced and knowledgeable fitness coaches who would love to help. Contact us today!