Why You Should Meal Prep For Weight Loss

Benefits of Meal Prepping Include:

1. Increase in consistency with you healthy lifestyle efforts. When you prep your food, healthy food will always be readily available so it will decrease the likelihood of you reaching for junk food to potentially derail your weight loss efforts. Being consistent will help you reach your weight loss goals faster.
2. Easily track what you are eating. A lot of times people assume they are eating healthy but don't realize all the extra snacks and junk they eat throughout the day. So if you prep your meals and only eat what you prep it will be easy to know for sure exactly what you are eating and measure or weigh your food to keep track of calorie count to make sure you are under your calorie limits for weight loss
3. Saves You Money. There's no need to eat out when you already have food at home!
4. Saves You Time. If you use one afternoon during the week to make all your meals, then you won’t waste any time the rest of the week cooking and cleaning up.

Tips to meal prep successfully

1. Plan for it: write down the meals you want for the week and grocery shop accordingly 

2. Schedule it: actually write down the day and time that’s best for you to put your meals together. When you write it down and schedule it you will be more likely to get it done.

3. Buy some containers; choose bigger ones for family style meal preps, and smaller ones for individual meal preps. I recommend glass meal prep containers as you will need to warm your food up in the microwave and there is less likely hood for contamination from BPA and other chemicals that can leak out of plastics. Plastic meal prep containers are cheaper than the glass ones though if you want to save money. But the glass containers will last longer.

4. Learn how to multitask when cooking. You can easily cook some items on the stovetop while simultaneously baking others or using your microwave.

 

5. Remember all your food doesn’t have to be made fresh from scratch; frozen veggies individually packaged meats like tilapia, salmon, and grilled chicken breast can cut down cook time. Premade salads with sauce on side work great too!

Meal Prep Ideas

For breakfast my favorites to prep are:

• Smoothie Prep Bags

• EggMuffin Cups 
  
  
  
• Overnight Oats
  
  
  

For Lunch/Dinner:

For Lunch or Dinner you can simply prep salads or choose. two of your favorite meats, veggies, and a carb. Try and add more veggies than carbs to your containers. Personally I like using chicken tilapia, or salmon as my meat. I'll switch up my veggies. Sometimes mixed veggies, broccoli, green beans, or asparagus. And for the carbs typically rice or potatoes. But If I'm going low carb I like to do a mushroom peppers mix. So when meal prepping for the week I sometimes cook two different meats so I don’t get bored eating the same thing all week. I typically steam, sautés, or roast veggies. One meal might be roast chicken, jollof rice and broccoli, while another might have salmon instead of chicken. The key is to try and fill up on the veggies and protein with minimal carbs 1 cup or less. So you are not eating less for weight loss but eating smarter. See Pictures Below for examples