What is meal prepping?

Meal prepping is where you make all of your meals for the week at once. This allows us to plan our entire week of meals before going to the grocery store.

Why should you meal prep?

Meal prepping is efficient. It saves us time throughout the entire week. We can spend two hours cooking our lunches and dinners at the beginning of the week or spend 30-45 min per night (dishes included) making these meals.

That is 30 minutes per meal 3 times a day = 90 min a day for 5 days = 7.5 hours per week. That saves us 5.5 hours each week that we can allocate doing whatever we’d like.

A few of our meals are made in a slow cooker. Fifteen minutes are spent preparing the dish and 4 hours later we have a set of delicious dinners.

Meal prepping is cost effective

This helps our bank accounts too! We think of 3 meals for the week that we can make. After that, we make a list of ingredients we need for the meals. This helps us in the grocery store to stay on top of our budget and to not overspend.

L and I use Google Keep to make our grocery list. We share the note with each other and we can both add to the list. We just have to bring our phones with to the store and stick to the list.

Another benefit to meal prepping is not wasting money going out to lunch every day. If the average lunch is $10 a meal and one goes out for lunch 5 days of the week, that equates to $200 a month and $2,400 a year!

Meal prepping is healthy

Meal prepping is also a healthier option because we have already made our plan for the week. This stops us from making impulse buys like going out to eat or unhealthy options at the grocery store. It also helps with portion control since each dish is already portioned out.

We can stick to our meal plan for the week and we know it will be a healthy meal. This takes the guessing out of what to eat. Just heat and eat!

Reduce food waste

We also have built-in accountability not to throw food away. Throwing away food is the same as throwing away money. The food is already made for the week, so we just need to put it in the microwave.

Fitness goals align with clean eating

Meal prepping helps with our fitness goals. I love to workout and eat right, so this helps simplify the process. I used to count my calories and hit my protein, carbs, and fats for the day. Meal prepping made this extremely easy to do. I would measure out each item and log it into MyFitnessPal.

Give it a try!

Ever have a diet but one week in you wanted to give it up? Give meal prepping a try! By making your meals ahead of time, you will have no excuse and will only need to heat the meals up and be on your way. You already know the nutrition will be good if you measure out the portions and protein, carbs, and fats of each meal. Remember that New Year’s Resolution? How’s that going?

You could use meal prepping to bulk up in the gym or even could be used for weight loss. Let us know how it goes!

What To Use

• • Glass meal prep bowls (You can use the smaller sized bowls for healthy snack prep. This makes it easy to grab and go.)

• • Rice cooker

• • Instapot

• Slow Cooker

There are many more items you can use to simplify your process but these are just the basics of meal prepping. Use the tips above to start today!