Most of us lead busy lives. Our Time is becoming one of our most valuable commodities.
We get up early, we go to work, get home late and spend some time with our family. Then we realise we have’t yet eaten. We look to see what’s in the fridge or freezer that can be eaten with little prep time. We decide that whatever we find will do and repeat this process for days on end.
If what we find in the freezer is frozen pizza or a ready meal from the local garage then any goals we have of feeling and looking better may end up taking a back seat for a while. If however we find a nice home cooked meal with some protein, some carbs and lots of veggies. Then we’re on our way!
This is where meal prep comes in. Developing some sort of food preparation routine will ensure that 80% of the times that we go looking to see what’s in the freezer, we find something that will help us achieve our nutrition goals. Something that will help us on our way to feeling and looking better rather than kicking the proverbial can down the road a while longer.
A food prep routine doesn’t mean having to set your alarm for 5AM on a Sunday morning and spending 12 hours in the kitchen until you have 3 square meals cooked for the next 7 days. Unless that’s something you enjoy that is!
The key to making a food preparation routine work for you is that it needs to be something that can fit in with your current routine, with the least disruption possible. That way it is more likely to stick around longer.
Try and find the way that works best for you. It can be an hour on a Sunday afternoon, or 5 minutes extra cooking time one evening to make a couple of extra portions of whatever you are cooking anyway so that you have a few meals ready to go later in the week when you don’t have as much time. Whichever way works best for you is the one you are most likely to stick with.
That being said, if you are someone who has a big goal of looking a certain way, be that gaining muscle, losing fat, or simply feeling healthier, and cooking is an alien concept to you and you want to get into a food preparation routine. Well then, you are just going to have to make the time and get stuck into it. You possibly won’t enjoy that part of the process but it will get you a hell of a lot closer to where you want to be.
I’t doesn’t even need to be the preparation of full meals. As an example, batch cooking a whole bunch of chicken breasts and freezing them means you have the protein part of your meals sorted for the next few days. All you need to do for dinner when you get home is defrost & heat the chicken (properly!) and add in some veg and some sort of carbs. Voila, meal ready! The veg could even be from frozen, nobody said it needed to be fancy!
If you honestly want to eat better, with the aim of feeling, looking and performing better then making some time to hit some food prep for the coming days will be a huge help.
Try and find the way that works best for you. Or just bite the bullet and spend the necessary time in the kitchen.