A beginner’s guide to meal prep
Eat better, feel healthier, save money and time by learning how to batch-cook lunches and dinners ahead of time
If your new year’s resolutions for 2020 involve eating better, one of the best ways to keep it is to start meal-prepping. It will free up so much time, plus if you bring your spoils for lunch, save you a bunch of money.
But how do you get started? If you’ve never done it before, meal-prepping can feel overwhelming. But it’s not, really. Here’s everything you need to know to succeed.
What is meal prep, and why should I try it?
Meal prep is exactly what it sounds like: prepping your meals (or meal components) ahead of time so your food is ready to eat whenever you are. The easiest way to do it? Pick a day when you’re free – usually a Saturday or Sunday – to prep enough food to get you through the upcoming week. You can plan just lunches, just dinners, or if you’re really organised (and have a big enough fridge), both!
People love meal-prepping because it makes life easy. Trying to figure out what to make for a meal every night can be stressful, and finding the time to make it can be even more so. Meal-prepping means you get all the work out of the way ahead of time. Instead of taking time to think about food and cooking during the week, everything’s already there.
Planning your meals ahead of time can make it easier to eat healthier too. “We tend to make better choices for our future selves than we do for our current selves,” says Georgie Fear, author of Lean Habits for Lifelong Weight Loss. It’s easy to succumb to takeout or frozen pizza when you’re exhausted after a long day. But you’ll probably be motivated to make better choices – say, salmon and quinoa or chicken and pepper fajitas – when you map out your menu in advance.
