The Basics of Meal Prepping

There are many ways to approach and meet your nutritional goals.   A great way to put yourself in the best position to succeed is to meal prep all or part of your meals for the week.  This works for you in a number of ways, but one of the biggest positive effects is on your decision making process.  The common question that we ask ourselves before we eat is, what do we WANT to eat, rather than what do we NEED to eat.  The latter question is much simpler and usually a lot easier to answer.  Eating in itself is a behavior and when it is approached as a behavior it begins to simplify the world of nutrition.  Just like other behavior changes that we try to make in order to have a positive personal or social outcome, eating should be approached in that same fashion.    Make the series of decisions for meal prepping based on how you actually behave and you will fill in the gaps in your nutrition that you may have had for a long time.Think about where you want to go and what has held you back in the past and that will lead you to better food choices.

I speak with a ton of people about their diets and their views on nutrition and when I ask them reasons that they choose less nutritious foods time and time again many of them tell me they eat what is easy or convenient at the time.  This means that when they are making a decision on what to eat for a meal they tend to go with what is right in front of them or something they can get very easily.  This can take the form of fast food, sugary drinks, or could even be comfort food.  A big question I pose to these same people is what if the easiest decision for food in a given meal WAS the healthiest decision.  Many of them tell me it would be much easier to eat the healthy option if this was the case.  ENTER MEAL PREPPING! That meal that you have already put the work in to cook and sitting right in the fridge is healthier for you too! An effective meal prep is a way to bring the healthy decision closer to the easy or convenient decision in a given situation. 

There are many things to consider when beginning to meal prep.  Make sure that what you are cooking and eating matches your goals and will be pushing you to actually be a healthier person.  We have all seen the meme where there are 7 Tupperware containers with one slice of pizza in each one.  This approach will not help you and will lead to you getting frustrated with the process of meal prepping all together.  However this does not mean that cannot outsource the cooking part of your meal prepping.  Next, make your food choices based on where you want to go not where you currently are.  Remember the principle of inertia in grade school? It applies here too.  Change only comes from change.  Make positive changes to what you put into your body and your body WILL make positive changes to how you output energy into the world.  Finally, make sure your food choices reflect your personal food taste.  This one is simple to explain.  If you don’t like the food you will not eat it.  No matter how much you tell yourself to eat something because it is healthy, if you do not like it you will be cleaning out uneaten food from Tupperware containers at the end of every week. A great way to avoid this is to find out what you like currently is healthy or will fit into your meal plan or you can even check out the series of my posts on social media with fun recipes that you can use in your meal prep by following the link below.  After carefully developing your meal plan you now have to take another look at yourself and decide how many days in a week you are ok with eating reheated meals from the fridge and how much time you can spend cooking during each week. 

There are three ways people try to meal prep. You will have the person who wants to cook everything for every meal they are going to eat for the entire week.  The next type of person will take that same mentality for a few days at a time.  This person will cook all of the food for every meal for the first 3 days of the week and then meal prep a second time for the remaining 4 days of each week.  Finally you can also meal prep by preparing the food for a single meal for the whole week.  This person might choose to prep lunch to help them eat during the day or they may prep breakfast to make sure they eat first thing in the morning.  There are pros and cons to each approach so you really need to figure out what will suit you and your needs best.  If you choose to prep your entire week of meals you may not want to eat seven day old salmon microwaved for the 7th time in a week.  If you prep only your lunches for the week you still need to account for breakfast, dinner and snacks during the rest of the day.  This is where exploring what really does and does not work for you individually in this process is really important.  This is a process that can be frustrating, trust me it will be worth it when you figure it out. 

Let us first tackle the person who wants to take care of all of the cooking in one day for every meal for the entire week.  This approach will be great for a person that always feels that they are rushed into their food choices due to a lack of time or high stress jobs.  My initial bit of advice for this person is to keep things incredibly simple. Only pick 1 dish for each meal for the week.  By this I mean that to only choose 1 breakfast, 1 lunch, 1 dinner and so on to make sure that you are not cooking way too many different things.  This will help you keep your cooking and distribution time to a minimum because you are cooking all on one day.  A secondary consideration is what types of foods keep better throughout the week than others.  If you food goes bad that will be wasted time on your part and we want to maximize our time not minimize it.  Maybe you are a person that knows they need to meal prep but knows they cannot eat the same things for an entire week.

It is ok to be a picky eater.  I REPEAT IT IS OK TO BE A PICKY EATER.  You can find healthy things that you enjoy eating. You are just going to have to look for them.  Taking the time to search out healthy dishes that fall into your taste is absolutely crucial to a healthy lifestyle and effective meal prep.  If you do not like what you are preparing you will not eat it.  If you are a picky eater and still want to meal prep take the middle approach.  Choose two days where you are going to cook for half of each week.  This approach will allow you to cook different things for different days of the week.  Instead of eating something for 7 days you will be eating them for 3 or 4 days at most.  Also you are not losing anytime on cooking different meals because you have already made the decision to cook twice during the week.  During your prep still keep things simple.  Common ingredients in meals cut down time in the store and during the cooking process. This approach also leads to a greater variety of options since you are not trying to keep things fresh for the whole week.  The next approach to meal prepping is by far the most common.  

Say you are the type of person that makes great eating decisions all day everyday, but you just forget to eat breakfast, or maybe you can not take a lunch break.  Meal prepping can help here.  Pick something that is easy to cook and you can eat on the go or quickly to make sure you get all the nutrients you need in your day.  The most common meal that people miss is breakfast.  There are many easy options for this ranging from something cold like overnight oats or a hot meal like an omelette in a mug.  If you are making a single meal you can also choose to break your week up and cook twice or you can just prepare your weeks worth of your meal at once.  Just like the first couple of approaches make sure you like your food and you are choosing things that will last until you are going to eat it.  

Now all of these approaches are assuming that you have time in your week to cook.  Now if you do not have time to cook that is OK, just be honest with yourself.  There are many services that will do all or part of your meal prep for you.  Find what your time commitment is going to be like and stick to it.  The more honest you are in your planning the more successful you will be in meeting your nutritional goals.

The meal prep process comes down to figuring out how you are going to function best throughout your week.  As humans we are better at making informed decisions when we make the decisions in advance when we are not hungry and are clear headed.  If you bring that view into nutrition it will point you directly towards planning and prepping your meals.  This approach will free up your mind for other decisions in your week rather than stressing about what you are going to eat, which will help you be more productive overall. Lastly I would like to echo the need to be completely honest with yourself during this process because that will lead to you having the most success with it.  If you need to focus on school or work and need to pass off the prep do it. You will be grateful for it in the end. 

By utilizing meal prepping and making other decisions in your daily life in advance is a simple trick to lowering overall stress.  By reducing stress and actually eating better meal prepping helps with all kinds of goals from weight loss all the way up to Olympic athletic performance.  Please shoot me a message or leave a comment if you have any recipes that you would like me to feature on my social media sites for all of us to try.  Finally subscribe on this page for updates on this blog and take a look at the links below for some ideas for your meal prep!  Good luck and keep striving to live that Highly Calibrated Lifestyle!