Let me know if this is a familiar scenario for you: You want to eat healthy for dinner tonight, but it takes too long to cook and clean up after, so you end up ordering out instead. Not only did you end up eating less healthy food, but you also spent more money than you needed to.
Why Meal Prep?
While meal prepping can sometimes be annoying–spending a few hours cooking, even if it only happens once a week can still be tiring–it can save you a lot of time in the future. People meal prep because it can save money, reduce food waste, and helps to ensure that you stick to your meal plan. Prepping your meals also means that you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to eat for breakfast/lunch/dinner, it’s already in the fridge and you just need to heat it up or put it together.
How You Can Meal Prep:
If what you’ve heard about meal prepping doesn’t sound like something that could work for you, know that there are different ways of doing it, too. If you don’t want to do individually portioned meals, you can cook one large batch instead and just heat up however much you want every day. Or you can do most of the prep in advance, like chopping up vegetables that you’ll use for a soup or salad later in the week.
If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of preparing every single meal in one day, remember that even meal prepping just one meal of the day can be very helpful. You can just do lunches so that when you’re at work you don’t have to go out and be tempted to make unhealthy decisions (and also save money).
And if money isn’t an issue for you, there are a bunch of meal delivery services that you can order from, too, and have all of your meals prepped for you.
The Cons:
Some people are turned off by meal prepping because they don’t like the idea of eating the same things every day. That’s a fair point, and while you can make a bigger variety of meals for the week, it will take twice as much work, usually. But to be honest, people are creatures of habit more often than they think. Most people will go to the same lunch places every day–out of comfort, simplicity, convenience, etc. For some people, eating the same meal every day isn’t ideal, but it’s just what’s practical (less time spent cooking) and it’s easier to stick to their diet and calorie count.
Additionally, cooking isn’t something everyone is comfortable with, but you can adjust to your skill level. A couple of tricks to cut down on actual cooking/meal prepping time are roasting in big batches and cooking in a crockpot or pressure cooker, where you can just leave it and spend time doing something else.
When you do research about diets and eating healthy, one of the main suggestions that you’ll see is often “cook your own meals.” Not everyone has time to do that every day, but if you plan ahead and do some meal prepping, it makes it a whole lot easier to eat healthier.