Tell us how many times you have ordered foods this week because you were too tired to cook. We know life can get really busy and after a day of work, you can barely keep yourself upright, let alone cook something healthy. But is takeaway or ordering foods the only solution? Are these easy fixes worth the money and the extra few pounds you keep gaining because of eating all the junk foods?
Well, they might provide you with some temporary fix, but if you are dependent on them for every meal, it’s time you should think seriously about your health and lifestyle. There is one easy solution to all of these issues- meal preparation. Meal preparation is the process of prepping meals in batches that can last a week or so.
The key benefit here is instead of going through the hassle of cooking every day, you cook once and enjoy healthy meals for the whole week. However, don’t think meal prepping will only help you with time-saving; it can have multifaceted advantages in your life. Let’s read on to know-how.
Meal Prep Will Help You Portion Your Foods
Portioning your foods or monitoring how much you are eating is vital when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight. And meal prepping will allow better control of your food portion. As you divide up the foods for various meals in individual containers, you will have less chance to eat more than your share.
Besides, as you have prepared the meals, and portioned them yourself, you know exactly the ingredients put in there and how much nutritional value you are getting from each meal. This saves you from overeating. If you want to learn some meal prep recipes that will help you better portion your foods, you can visit Mealprepify.
Meal Prepping Will Save You Time
While you do need a significant amount of time to plan and cook all your meals ahead of the schedule, it will free up the rest of the weeks for you. Once all the stress about food preparation is sorted, you can invest your time being more productive.
Even if you have to spend a good portion of your weekend slaving away in the kitchen, you will thank yourself later on the weekdays when you will be able to catch up with other chores around the house. And cooking in a large batch usually saves you time than cooking in a smaller portion.
Besides, if you cook before every meal, think about the dishes piling up on your sink. Even if you have a dishwasher, dealing with dirty dishes twice a day will take up a good chunk of time.
Meal Prepping Ensures Easy Calorie Tracking
When you are preparing meals individually, you have to constantly measure your ingredients and nutrients to find out how many calories you are consuming. This type of macro tracking can get tedious and time-consuming.
But when you are batch prepping your meals, you know every time how many calories you are going to take. Measuring them once is enough as you portion them for each day, and measuring the protein or carbohydrate for every meal is not required.
Encourages Better Food Choices
When you get home being exhausted from work, you have little energy to cook. And that usually leads to opting for something unhealthy, because your brain seeks some relief from the stress and wants you to indulge in comfort. It’s hard to resist the temptation and the only way you can achieve that is by substituting unhealthy options with healthy ones.
Once you have stocked up your fridge with healthy meals and get rid of all unhealthy foods, you will naturally pick healthy foods. Meal prepping puts a stop to your impulse buying. When you learn to balance your taste and nutritional needs, you will buy only healthy foods.
Meal prepping encourages you to track your nutritional needs and actual food intake and to balance these you are bound to cut out foods that only taste good but are not beneficial to your health.
You, Will Be Less, Stressed About Planning Your Next Meal
Have you ever found yourself thinking about what you are going to have for dinner while you are yet to take the first bite of your lunch? We all have gone through this situation many times. However, meal prepping can help you break free of this cycle.
Once your fridge is stocked with a week’s worth of healthy meals you do not have to stress over the next meal. And let us tell you, that’s a huge relief if you are navigating through a busy schedule.
Meal Prepping Can Save You From Food Waste
One of the major downsides of randomly picking your groceries or cooking without portioning is, you end up dumping most of the foods in the trash can. Meal prepping will ensure that you utilize most of the ingredients in your pantry and cook exactly the amount you need throughout the week.
It teaches you how to pick the best foods that are easy to cook and provide you with the necessary nutrients. For instance, if you need rice, beans, legumes, or potatoes, buy them in bulk and store them accordingly. This way you can have them for the whole week and even use the leftovers for the next week. This ultimately saves you from wasting food and money.
Meal Prepping Saves You Money
Have you ever found yourself wandering around the grocery aisles thinking about what to buy for the week? Let us tell you, grocery shopping without a list will always turn out to be a bad decision. If you don’t have any idea of what to buy, you will end up buying items that are hard to incorporate in recipes, forget the core ingredients, or buying too much or too little.
As a result, you might have to go for several groceries runs a week, and it will quickly dry up your food budget. Besides, when you don’t have food in your home, you are more tempted to eat out or order food. And that can quickly eat up your paycheck. Meal prepping will teach you how you can save money by buying in bulk.
The Bottom Line
Opting for a better lifestyle might seem hard at first and meal prepping is no different. However, the core concept here is to control your environment so that there are only elements that encourage you to make a good decision about food. If you don’t have the tempting elements that lead you to unhealthy food choices you will be better able to stick with the healthy options. Surround yourself with good things, and you will get into a natural routine that involves healthy choices. Therefore, adapt the art of meal prepping and stock up your fridge with healthy meals so that you get no excuse to order any junk foods next time you are too exhausted to cook.