The best way to achieve and maintain your weight loss goals is by meal prepping for the week. Meal prepping will eliminate the guess work, it makes healthy eating a lot more convenient, it limits the chances of you falling off track and most of all, it saves you time.
How To Prep Meals For The Week?
Now, meal prep can take form in certain ways. For example, if you currently don’t even have a set framework for grocery shopping, picking a specific day to go load up on healthy foods is a perfect place to start. On the other hand, if you already cook a few times a week, a nice start to your meal prep journey may be specifying one day to prepare food for the entire week. However skilled you may be, there’s always a place to start.
Plan Your Food Shopping
To get started with meal prep, you must first choose a specific time of the week to do the preparation. Once you’ve chosen your time to chef up, plan to grab your groceries accordingly. As you begin your journey, try and plan out your meals by the week or by the month to keep things interesting. Also, as you grow more experienced with your meal prep, you can begin to keep an eye out for deals on ingredients you use often.
Organize Your Cooking Time
When it’s your meal prep day, remember to focus on preparing the foods that take the longest to cook to best manage your time. These include proteins (like chicken, meat, or fish), whole grains, beans, and roasted vegetables. When meal prepping, remember to multitask, meaning to use the time that one thing is in the oven to prepare the next. Time is essential!
Snacks Are Important Too
Try to prepare food options that can be used as snacks as well as meals! When you aren’t hungry for a full meal, it’s always great to have healthy snacks around to avoid grabbing for the sugary and processed foods.
Store Cooked Meals Well
Meal Prep is an excellent way to maintain a healthy lifestyle, but storing the food properly is super important to keep up your meal prep success. Try labeling your meals with dates so you are exactly sure how long everything will stay fresh. Another tip is to store easily perishable ingredients in the areas of the fridge you see most often so that you use them before they expire.
Meal Prep For Weight Loss Ideas
Are you curious to learn about meal prep for weight loss ideas? If so, you will be amazed at the handful of recipes that we have below. Let’s take a look at some tasty options to consider.
Fried Rice, Cauliflower and Chicken Breast
Stir fry rice in water and olive oil. Then, steam a handful of cauliflower florets before combining these ingredients with a roasted chicken breast. This is one of the tastiest meal prep weight loss recipes and it will only require 30 minutes to cook.
Egg Whites, Tomatoes and Crushed Red Pepper
This easy meal prep for weight loss represents a great way to start your day. Scramble three or four egg whites and combine them with diced tomatoes alongside a pinch of crushed red pepper. The pepper will add a zesty flavour while the tomatoes offer ample amounts of folate and vitamin C.
Fried Salmon, Ginger and Sweet Potatoes
First, grate a handful of freshly cut ginger. Then, pan fry a fillet of salmon until both sides are brown. Add the ginger as a caramelising agent. Serve with a side of baked sweet potatoes. Not only will the ginger help to enhance the flavour of the fish, but it can aid in digestion.
Reasons Why Meal Prepping Is Good For Your Weight Loss
Meal prep curbs your temptations
When you’ve had a busy day at work, your next line of thought might be to grab some take out on your way home. But if you have a perfectly healthy meal waiting for you at home, and all you need to do is microwave it’s easy to resist the temptation to have a pizza or something not very healthy. Strike one against village people, haha!
You get to kill morning hunger
Meal prepping isn’t only great for lunch and dinner. It’s also great for breakfasts. Busy people know how the morning frenzy often means missing breakfast. Well, you can say goodbye to that.
Overnight oats are a fabulous breakfast that can be prepared the night before. What’s more, you can have it on the go. It’s a grab-and-go kind of healthy breakfast. All you need to do is mix some of our toasted oats with some Greek yoghurt and almond milk or any milk of your choice, and store it in the fridge overnight. The next morning, you can add nuts, nut butter or fruits to boost the nutrition value and add flavour.
Meal prep helps add variety to your diet
When you plan your meals, you’re able to include the much-needed variety to make sure you’re having a balanced diet. This is something you need if you must lose weight. You need a controlled blend of carbs, proteins and fats.
But when you’re eating only what’s available per time, your options are greatly limited. Plan your meals around the things your body needs and earn strike 2 against your village people.
Meal prepping helps you count calories
If you’re on a weight loss journey, you know that to lose weight you must be on a calorie-deficit intake. As long as you’re eating fewer calories than your body needs, you will lose weight. When you meal prep, you have the opportunity to plan your calorie-deficit diet ahead.
Make sure that every meal you put together has just the right amount of calories that you need to eat to achieve your daily calorie goal. If you can do this and be consistent at it, not to mention disciplined, it will be no time before you see all the weight disappear and you can once again wear those outfits you’ve refused to give out in the hopes that you’ll become a size 8 again.
Meal prepping helps you control what you eat
If you’re disciplined about your eating habits and you stick to your prepped meals, you will achieve great results. This is because you’ll no longer eat whatever is available or whatever you crave. Your meal plan and prepped meals have the final say on what you eat. No shawarma or ice cream can change your mind.
Conclusion: Is meal prepping good for weight loss? Absolutely! If we’ve convinced you to try meal prepping, this next part is for you.
Tips To Get You Started With Prepping Meals For Weight Loss
1. Start with a master list
Your master list will help you recall family-favourite recipes, and then you can add recipes that can help you use up ingredients and save money when you need to do something new.
2. Set aside a day to cook
For instance, begin your meal prepping over the weekend. Spend one to two hours in the kitchen chopping and cooking as much as you can ahead of time to reduce the amount of time to get a meal on the table each night.
3. Start small
If meal-prepping for a week feels daunting, don’t think about seven days. Focus on three or four instead. This way, you still only need to cook twice a week, not every single day.
4. Repeat
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every week. Instead, get into a cycle of planning for a week’s worth of meals and repeating it later.
Tricks To Speed Up Meal Prep on a Weight Loss Diet
After a long and tiring day at work, the last thing you want to do is cut, chop, and put together a “healthy” dinner that wouldn’t throw you out of calorie deficit and ensure you are right on track on the weight loss journey. Home-cooked meals make sure you are eating healthy food, but on hectic days, when there’s no time to wash, peel, chop, boil stuff, putting together a “healthy” meal would seem like a hassle. That’s where meal prepping comes into the picture, when you know that there are “ready-to-eat” dishes waiting to be thawed, heated, or available in a “ready to cook” form, it would just take a few minutes to plate a weight-loss friendly dish. Also, meal prepping saves you a lot of time and takes away the uncertainty to figure out what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. Meal prepping also makes sure you are not falling to the temptation of opting for readymade food packets, instant noodles, or the most convenient of all, order food from outside when you are too tired to cook. As we have always maintained, meal prepping makes sure you are not steering outside of your weight loss diet plan, and just a few hours from the weekend, can set you for weight loss success for the rest of the week. Preparing batches of ready-to-eat/ready-to-cook dishes and storing them up in the refrigerator that would last for whole week, would not only help you to stick to the diet plan better, this practice will also save lots of money (cutting down the frequency of eating out and ordering food) from restaurants and eateries. All geared up to meal prep? Before that, read up on these 6 tricks to speed up the whole process.
1. Pick Easy-To-Cook, Healthy, Weight-Loss Friendly Recipes: Your job is half done when you know what to cook without having to worry about calorie counting – and you can find recipes and meal plans that trigger fat burning on the Rati Beauty diet. Download the Rati Beauty app for more details.
2. Keep a Day To Do Meal Prep: Just one or two hours in a week is enough to wash, cut, chop, peel, prepare batches of healthy food for the rest of the week, and you can choose which day of the week is convenient to meal prep. Peeling and steaming veggies, marinating meat, boiling eggs, washing green leafy vegetables, preparing trail mix packets all take very little time, and you can do so while watching tv, listening to a podcast or favorite playlist on the weekend or any other day of the week.
3. Shop For The Entire Week and Stick To the Diet Plan’s Grocery List: The thumb rule of meal prepping is to make sure the kitchen is well stocked with essentials and ingredients needed to prepare the dishes. Picking up groceries according to the meal plan, for the entire week, saves time and money as well. Your grocery list determines whether you would lose weight or gain a few more extra pounds over the next few days. Grocery shopping is not an easy task, especially, when you are obsessed about losing weight the healthy way. When you shop groceries according to the diet plan for the entire week, meal prepping becomes super easy because all the ingredients are handy, and you are not scouting around looking for them when you get down to the prepping table. To make things easy, we have “99 grocery items that any dietician would approve” so that you know what to pick and what to dump while buying groceries.
4. Invest in Meal Prep Containers: To keep food fresh and properly portioned, plastic resealable bags and air-tight containers come in handy. They also make labelling pretty easy. Glass and microwave safe meal prep containers promote the habit of healthy eating and save a lot of time during hectic weekdays where there is little time to cook homemade food. Preparing batches of healthy food and storing them up in the fridge, that would last for most days in the week will save a lot of money, and cut down loads of calories that make their way through ordered foods from restaurants and eateries. If you are using plastic containers, make sure they are BPA free.