Meal prep: preparing or planning meals in advance. It doesn't have to be preparing all meals for an entire week.
Doing some sort of meal prep can help you out in the future by saving you time, effort and money.
Having something pre-prepared means when you are busy and hungry during the week you don’t have to think about it, prepare it, or purchase it.
When you are cooking one meal, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to increase the size and cook a few more portions at the same time.
In the time it takes to cook 1 meal, you could cook 5 and set yourself up to save some time later in the week.
For the same price as buying 1 meal out, you could cook 5 and save yourself some cash.
Not only can it save money, it also means you need to make less food decisions later in the week. Less decisions about food when tired and hungry.
If you buy your lunch everyday, it might be easy to buy something like a chicken salad on Monday but by the time Friday rolls around, you’re a bit tired and in the moment something a bit higher calorie, less nourishing is too hard to say no to for the 5th day in a row.
Meal prep doesn’t have to mean spending hours on a Sunday having the whole week organised. A little extra effort when you are already in the kitchen and you’ll really thank yourself.
Need Inspiration?
There are some great social media accounts to get some inspiration for what to cook. Our favourites are:
@mason_woodruff
@seriouseats
Not Into Meal Prep?
You don’t need to prepare the whole meal, you could keep some veggies cut up in containers in the fridge. Using time when you have it to get the veggies chopped, could be all you need later in the week to motivate you to stir fry those chopped veggies with a protein option, rather than getting a pizza delivered.
Keep in mind that meal prep is not a necessity and there are plenty of “grab and go” meal options to help you towards your goal, without great expense or a lot of time.
The food court is not the only option when you step out of the office to grab lunch. There are many 'zero cook' options available at supermarkets.
