A Beginner's Guide to Meal Prepping
Meal prepping has been a hot trend in the health and weight loss world for a while now. It’s an easy way to get well balanced nutrition, without having to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday. It may seem daunting and overwhelming, but starting small and having some knowledge ahead of time helps.
“Where do I start?”
There are many ways you can incorporate meal prepping into your life. Maybe you want to prepare every meal for the week on Sunday and not have to worry for the rest of the week. You may wish to cook every few days, making 1 or 2 meals per day. You don’t have to know every detail of what and when you’ll eat, but a general idea helps. Decide how much time you want to spend cooking per week, how often you’d like to cook, if you’re willing to freeze meals or would rather cook more often and keep them refrigerated. A good place to start would be on Sunday, making 2-3 servings of something you could have for lunch the next few days.
“Why meal prep?”
Meal prepping has a lot of benefits. Not only will it be easier to eat healthier foods and avoid drive thru’s, but it will also save you time and money. You may spend 3 hours cooking once a week, but that’s much better than spending an hour just on dinner each night. As for money, it will depend on what you cook, but I’m able to get every meal made for less than $2/serving and have had a lot of variety and satiety.
“What do I need?”
Luckily, you probably already have a lot of the materials you’d need like food storage and cookware. Here are some good supplies to have at your disposal.
Food storage
Jars, tupperware, ziploc bags. Having many types of storage is ideal as you can use what best fits the needs of each meal, but as long as it properly stores your food, you’re in the clear. Just don’t buy the cheap 10 pack of plastic containers labeled “meal prep,” as I’ve had these break on me too many times.
Food Scale
This one’s pretty self explanatory. While you can use volumetric measurements for many foods, checking the weight is helpful when you can't scoop something evenly into a measuring cup, like meat or broccoli.
Groceries
Now obviously you’d need food to make a meal, but it’s more thought out than that. Think about how many meals you’ll need, and what you’d like to eat, build the meals on paper, and then see what groceries you need to make them. Trying to focus on foods that store well will help. A salad may be healthy but it won’t last in your freezer.
Recipes
Having a good list of recipes available is a good way to keep your meals from getting repetitive. There are thousands of cookbooks specialized to certain diets, and even more recipes exist online.
Cookware
Aside from the typical pots and pans, you’ll want things to make your meal prepping easier. For cooking larger volumes, a stock pot and Wok are good options to increase the amount of food you’re able to make. George foreman grills and panini presses are a great way to cook some meat while tending to something on the stove. Large baking sheets allow you to bake a lot of meat and vegetables which you can just toss in the oven, set a timer and forget about it.
“How far ahead can I prepare meals?”
This one differs by each person and each meal. A good plan is to freeze whatever food you aren’t eating the next day, and each evening take the next day’s meal(s) out of the freezer and move them to the fridge to thaw. You don’t need to freeze things if you plan on cooking more often, though I find having a backlog of meals frozen allows me to have more variety in my diet.
“Do I have to eat the same thing daily?”
You don’t! The common misconception about meal prepping is that you’ll have the same chicken and vegetables over and over and get burnt out. Meal prepping is what you want it to be. If you need a lot of variety to not get tired of your meals, just follow this simple equation to figure out how much of each food to cook.
So let’s say you want to prepare lunch and dinner for Monday-Friday. This would be 10 meals. Say you don't want to eat the same meal twice in two days. You’d need 4 unique meals to prevent having the same thing two days in a row.
The remainder here is where you decide which recipe you’d like to have more servings of. If you make 2 servings of 4 of the meals, you would have 8 and just need 2 more to finish your week. Add a serving to two of the meals, make another recipe, or add two servings to one of the meals. Here's what your week could look like:
“How do I decide what to cook?”
Building your meals can seem like a lot of work, but it mainly comes down to your macronutrient goals. If your diet requires you to stay under 60g of carbs, and you need a high protein intake, you’d want to look for foods high in protein and low in carbohydrates, such as chicken or eggs. Your main focus here will likely be a source of protein, usually meat or fish of some kind, and carbohydrates, which would mean finding something to accompany the protein while not going over your limits. Every person’s meal prep is going to look different depending on what you hope to get out of it and how you work. Building a meal in a food tracker app such as ‘CarbManager’or ‘MyFitnessPal’ will help you decide what to eat by telling you each food's nutrition info. One thing that’s helped me feel like I have more options is to prepare ingredients that you can combine later. When you have sides that were prepped ahead — you just need to cook your source of protein — then fill in with what you already have prepped.
“Now what?”
So you know how to build a meal, what items you’ll need, and how to plan out your meals for the week, but what do you do first? Start prepping! Cook just as you normally would, split it into different servings and store it. Don’t try to jump right into every meal prepped for every day, or you’ll likely get burnt out. Starting smaller allows you to find recipes you like the most, figure out how long you’re okay with eating the same food, and gives you a better idea of what it will take to meet your nutritional goals.