It is not easy to eat as healthy as we should. All too often, we are in a rush and have little time to devote to cooking. The result is that we tend to eat a lot of fast food and processed foods. The key to being able to eat healthy every day even when we are busy is to do a weekly meal prep session.
This involves putting together a series of meals for every day of the week so you don’t have to eat on the run. You already have a healthy and balanced meal that only requires you to heat it up. There are some keys to being able to pull this off. In this article, we will go over some tips to help you make your meal prep easy.
1 – Have the right tools
Being set up with the right tools is what is going to make prepping meals for every day of the week less of a chore, when you don’t have the right tools, it becomes too difficult and most people give up on it quickly.
The first thing to have is a sharp knife to make your prep very easy and fast. You are going to be cutting and chopping a lot of vegetables and slicing a lot of meat. Have a whetstone to make sure your knife is as sharp as possible and it will be a breeze to get through all the veggies you will be cutting.
A good cutting board that is flexible is also a good tool to have since it will make it easy to transfer your chopped veggies into the pot or bowl where they need to go. A good food processor is also essential as it will make quick work of getting things worked down to a paste or make a quick dough.
2 – Have a gameplan
Organization skills are crucial to have when you want to do your weekly meal prep. It starts out with thinking about the meals you will need to eat for them to be balanced and healthy as well as filling and satisfying. Think about breakfast and come up with a meal that can be done ahead of time. Then have a lunch that features some type of grain, vegetable side dish, and protein such as meat or eggs. The same should go for dinner only a bit lighter than lunch.
Once you have a list of the foods you want to cook, you will need to have a detailed shopping list. Try to overlap some of the foods to be used in different meals so you aren’t buying too many ingredients.
3 – Have plenty of take-out boxes
The easiest way to stick with your meal plan during the week is to have everything portioned and boxed up. This way you can grab a box out of the fridge and heat it up so it’s ready to eat in seconds. The way to go about this is to have plenty of take-out containers that you can reuse so you have the perfect portion at your fingertips.
