Disclaimer: I'm not one of those fitness people who meal prep - prepare and store meals ahead of week to just grab and heat up later - so I'm kind of not the right person to talk about meal prepping. But I've thought about the subject a lot and can therefore speculate different aspects of meal prepping. So let's dive in.
First of all, if you're a busy person who doesn't want to spend time every day cooking, and if you don't have the money to eat out your every meal, and if you don't have a personal chef at your disposal, preparing meals in advance will save you a ton of time. And even if you're not a busy person but would like to have more time to get more stuff done, using a couple of hours every Sunday to cook the meals of the upcoming week will do the trick. Just remember to use the time that's suddenly freed up to doing productive tasks.
Secondly, having all your meals prepared in advance decreases the temptation to deviate from your diet by getting something quick and easy from a cafe or a grocery store or a deli - whatever you may pass by during your day - because you know, right from the start of the day, what you'll have for meals that day. You'll have your lunch and snack with you when you leave home. You have a dinner waiting for you when you get home. Your brain will be wired to think you'll eat those and those alone that day, ever since you prepared the meal.
Thirdly, it will take so much less time to cook a big batch once than to cook several individual meals of the same dish. So you don't have to waste the entire Sunday, a couple of hours is enough.
It will be time-saving, delicious, convenient, and practical - all rolled into one.
And if you don't like microwaved food, you can meal prep dishes that don't require heating up, like a rich salmon salad or hummus and carrots.
So for breakfasts, you can make a huge batch of boiled eggs or a large case of overnight oats - ready to be grabbed out of the fridge in the morning. For lunches, prepare an enormous salad or a gigantic pot of soup and portion it out into single-serving jars. For snacks, well, a bag of apples might do - just take one with you and the lunch jar when you leave the house in the morning. And dinners? Well, how about an entire salmon, cooked in the oven with sweet potatoes, cut into appropriate pieces?
For most of these, the process of cooking on a Sunday is just putting something in the oven or mixing a couple of ingredients in a bowl - and letting time do its trick. Handy, eh?
RK
