Lifestyle Tips — meal prepping
January Meal Prep with Dried Foods 0
January meal prepping with dried foods like grains, proteins, fruits, and vegetables saves time and ensures healthy eating. Freeze-dried items offer convenience, long shelf life, and nutritional value, simplifying meal preparation during busy schedules.How to Meal Prep: 6 Key Benefits of Meal Prepping 0
Meal prepping is a food trend that is here to stay. It is a great way to save time and money and reduce food wastage. In addition, it helps you to make quick and healthy meals. It ranges from smoothie packs for breakfast to cooking complete meals for dinner and lunch for a few days. So, if you’re interested in saving time in the kitchen while making healthy food choices, you should try it.
The best part is that you don’t have to spend an entire day prepping. Instead, spend as little as 30 minutes cooking your favorite meals by choosing freeze dried products that are ready to use. Ultimately, meal prepping will make your life easier. This article will share tips on getting started and the benefits you will get. Let’s dive in.
What Is Meal Prepping?
Meal prepping involves grocery shopping, preparing meals in advance, and storing them as ready-to-eat packs. So, for example, you can pack your breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snacks for a week rather than doing it every evening. The purpose is to have healthy and nutritious home-cooked meals without the fuss of cooking every day.
Why Should You Meal Prep?
Meal prepping is an effective way to save cooking time, especially if you have a busy schedule. It reduces food waste and the temptation to eat out or order in when you’re too exhausted to cook. Additionally, it allows you to eat home-cooked meals without cooking from scratch.
Is Meal Prep For Everyone?
Meal prepping is excellent for people who desire to eat home-cooked meals but have a tight schedule. It is for people who value time, budget, convenience, and efficiency, and want to control their meals rather than eat something different every day. On the contrary, meal prepping is not for you if you prefer eating freshly prepared food to eating leftovers.
What Foods Work Well When Meal Prepping?
Cooked beans, freeze dried vegetables, cooked grains, nuts, seeds, cheese, freeze dried fruits, and cooked meat are excellent choices. However, some foods don’t work well with meal prep, such as soft fruits and vegetables such as berries, cut fruit, and crunchy foods like chips and crackers.
Meal Prepping With Freeze Dried Products
You don’t have to make all foods from scratch. Instead, buy freeze dried vegetables, dried vegetables, and freeze dried fruits to reduce your cooking time. For example, a recipe that would need garbanzo beans will save a lot of time by using dehydrated garbanzo beans or dehydrated black beans. More so for vegetables like dried carrots and broccoli: it saves you the time to clean and chop them. So, all you need to do is rehydrate them, and in minutes, your salad is ready.
How Long Can The Prepared Meals Stay In The Refrigerator?
There’s no one rule about storing meal preps. All foods stored in the refrigerator slowly decline in quality. Also, how you pack the food and the refrigerator’s environment can impact the quality of the meal preps. However, preparing the meal preps for 3-7 days max is a good idea.
How to Meal Prep
First, decide the duration you want to meal prep, whether it’s three days or a week. Then, plan the meals you’ll prepare for those days. Secondly, choose the breakfast, lunch, or dinner recipes.
Then, write down the ingredient you need for the recipes you’ve chosen. Next, schedule the day for shopping and preparing the meals. Lastly, prepare the meals and store them in the refrigerator. See what works for you, and then adjust accordingly.
To succeed as a beginner, start for a day. Pack your lunch box with the leftovers for dinner one night. If you like the taste, you can prepare more food. Start with a single recipe meal prep that provides the protein, grain, and vegetable instead of a meal that needs two or three recipes together. Subsequently, you can try for two or three day’s lunch and dinner.
You will need containers of different shapes and materials, ideally glass or BPA-free plastics that you can microwave. You can also buy reusable Ziploc bags that are BPA-free.
6 Benefits of Meal Prepping
Meal prepping saves time
Cooking homemade meals can take a lot of time. But, using a Sunday afternoon to meal prep the week’s menu in advance can pay off and save you time to rest during the busy weekdays. Also, being hungry and tired can be stressful when you don’t know what to cook for dinner. Imagine beating the evening rush and traffic then getting home, and your mind is blank on what to cook. So, you decide to order takeaway, because you have an early morning and need to rest.
Instead of wasting time deciding what to cook, all you need is to open the refrigerator, get your meal prep, warm it, and enjoy. Meal prepping also means you’ll have fewer dishes to do in the evening.
Meal prepping saves you money
Apart from risking your health because of unhealthy choices, eating out or ordering in every day is costly. So, meal prepping is a huge money saver. It is cheaper to buy ingredients in bulk, and also, you’ll spend less on takeaways. A shopping list for meal prepping also avoids impulse buying when shopping at the grocery store. You can save the money and spend it on your vacation or pay off the mortgage.
Meal prepping saves you energy
Meal prepping is great for busy people who want to maintain healthy eating. Cooking is exciting, but it can be cumbersome to cook daily. For example, you may be on track from Monday to Wednesday. Then you get busy and tired on Thursday and decide to order takeaway.
Having prepared meals means you’ll spend less energy cooking and get more time to rest or do other things. Furthermore, you can prepare cooking ingredients at once for various recipes rather than chopping them daily.
Meal prepping reduces food wastage
When you meal prep, you go grocery shopping in advance with a list of what you need. Everything you buy has a purpose in the recipes you have planned, so there’s less risk of food items that will go bad. Set aside time every week to plan your meals. It is worth the effort. Meal prepping takes time to get used to, but it is the right step for a healthy lifestyle.
Benefits of meal prepping for weight loss
Whether you’re trying to lose weight or maintain a healthy diet, meal planning is an easy way to reach your goals. You control your portion sizes more than when eating in restaurants because they usually have large portions. Furthermore, when you prepare your food, you control the ingredients you use in your cooking. So if you want to attain your weight goals, meal prepping is for you.
Health benefits of meal prepping
When you get home exhausted at the end of the day, it could be tempting to reach out for a quick, unhealthy meal or unhealthy snacks because you are too tired to cook. Unfortunately, we tend to choose unhealthy foods because of convenience. But if you had a ready meal prepared in advance, all you need is to warm it and eat.
Ready to get started with meal prepping? Get out there and prep those meals. Check out our freeze dried products that make meal prepping a breeze. We’d love to hear if meal prepping has worked for you. Please share your comments, tips, and meal prep wins in the comment section below.
References
