How to Start Meal Prepping

One of the most effective ways to hit your fitness and wellness goals is to start meal prepping. This simply refers to preparing and organizing your meals ahead of time in order to ensure your goals are being hit and to save time and money. Otherwise, you may find yourself eating in an unorganized way and indulging more due to a lack of time or motivation.

The best way to start meal prepping is to decide on your goals, plan the meals which meet your goals, purchase ingredients and tupperware, pick a time to cook, and to keep it simple.

Meal prepping isn’t rocket science, and what’s nice is that it doesn’t require as much motivation as it would to eat healthy without it. Rather than cooking a healthy meal every day and resisting the temptation to eat out, you just have to muster up the motivation for one day and cook all of your meals for the week. Then, you already have the meals there and you can be lazy the rest of the week and not cook yet still achieve your goals. This is just one of many appeals when it come to meal prepping. But let’s go into the specifics on how to start meal prepping if you haven’t before.

Decide on Your Goals

Your goals will decide what your meals are going to be. So before you can do anything, you need to know what you want to achieve. Do you want to lose weight? Lose fat? Gain weight/muscle? The answers to these questions will determine what your macronutrient ratio or calories will be, which is how you will measure your foods.

There is some debate on this but the general consensus leans toward counting macros (fat, carbs, protein) vs. counting calories. This is more of a focused approach and takes into account nutrition versus just eating food. Fitness expert Dr. Jim Stoppani in his article “Dieting 101” recommends this macro ratio:

Protein: 1-1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight.

Carbohydrates: 0.5-1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight. (depending on workout intensity and carb sensitivity)

Fat: 0.5 grams per pound of bodyweight.

And in case you are wondering how many calories that is:

• 1 gram of protein= 4 calories
• 1 gram of carbs= 4 calories
• 1 gram of fat = 9 calories

So if you weighed 150 lbs and ate 1 gram of protein per pound, 1 gram of carbs per pound and 0.5 grams of fat per pound, these would be your macros:

Protein: 150 g= 600 calories

Carbs: 150 g= 600 calories

Fat: 75 g= 675 calories

Your calories intake would be 1875 calories. And you can experiment with these numbers since everybody is a little bit different. If your goal is to lose fat and you aren’t seeing results, you could try reducing your carb intake slightly until you do. For those who are wanting to gain muscle, it is especially important to try to get as much protein in as you can. So shoot for 1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight. Every situation is a little bit different but this will get you started. Now it is time to plan your meals.

Plan Your Meals

Now that you have your goals and macros that you want to hit, you can plan your meals. If you want to plan and prep all of your meals for each day, you can divide your total macros by how many meals you want to eat during the day. Or, an easier way may be to only prepare ahead of time the foods that you eat outside of the home such as lunch, and only plan the other foods you will later cook at home such as breakfast and dinner. 

A simple way to organize your meals and see nutritional facts is by using a free meal tracking app like MyFitnessPal where you can input the foods and amounts and get a macronutrient breakdown. A trick to come up with your meals is to think of a protein, carbohydrate, and vegetable for each meal. Here are some ideas to get started.:

Protein: Chicken, steak, pork, eggs, shrimp, fish, peanut butter, soy.

Carbohydrates: Rice, sweet potato, quinoa, beans, mashed potatoes, bread.

Vegetables: Broccoli, peas, brussel sprouts, spinach, mixed salad, carrots.

On MyFitnessPal there is an option to create meals which you can save for later. So you can experiment with foods and quantities until you get the macros and calories you want and then save those in your app. Then, make a list of the needed ingredients and calculate the amounts to buy by simply multiplying the amounts in one meal by however many days you need. Now it’s time to go to the store.

Purchase Ingredients and Tupperware

This step is pretty straight forward. Plan a time to go to the store and buy what you need. You could also use a personal shopper or meal delivery service with certain stores such as Wal Mart. Also realize that you will need LOTS of Tupperware to store your individual meals and have them properly sealed. You can get some here on Amazon or wherever you’d prefer to buy them if you don’t own enough.

Pick a Time to Cook

Probably the hardest part about meal prepping is just getting around to cooking all of that food. However, you will find that it takes about the same amount of time to make enough food for ten meals as it does to make one. You are simply cooking more food than you normally would at one time so it actually saves you a lot of time during the week. 

Many people pick Sunday to prepare their meals because 1) many people don’t work on Sunday and 2) it is the day before the workweek so your meals are as fresh as they can be. Try to multitask to save time by cooking multiple items simultaneously. Start with what takes the longest. For example, you can put the rice in the cooker, start to boil water for your vegetables, and start grilling your meat while everything else cooks. 

Then, you measure out the meals with the quantities you had planned previously to meet your macros and put them in each tupper and then in the fridge. 

It feels so good when you finish cooking and know that you have 5-10 meals done that you don’t have to cook during the week. It takes a lot of stress and time out of eating healthy and meeting your goals. So set the same time each week and cook!

Keep It Simple

Try to keep your meal prep as simple as possible, especially when you are just starting. Many people go overboard and start looking up complicated recipes on Youtube which use foods and ingredients that you normally never use. This is counterproductive and leads to a quick burnout. Something doesn’t need to have a complicated recipe to be nutritious. It doesn’t take a genius to fry chicken, cook rice, and boil broccoli. Yet this is the staple meal for many bodybuilders. So pick food that you like and are easy for you. And just mix it up a little each week by switching your proteins, carbs, and vegetables. Just start with prepping one meal of the day like lunch and if you’d like to, you can start prepping breakfast or dinner once you get the hang of it. 

I promise it will get rid of a whole lot of stress and save you time and money, while helping you achieve the health and body of your dreams. 

Good luck prepping!

Also check out, How to Create Your Own Gym Routine.