In this modern world, it becomes difficult to maintain a healthy and balanced diet with a busy schedule and multiple fast food options everywhere. However, it is possible to maintain a healthy diet with a little planning and preparation. Meal prepping allows you to eat a healthy diet without spending hours in the kitchen each day.
What is Meal Prepping?
Preparing your healthy meal is the practice of preparing and arranging food components in advance for the whole week. It includes preparing meal components or ingredients in bulk for the whole week in advance so that they are readily available to use. Meal prepping can save money and time by minimising daily cooking time. It can be a useful approach for busy individuals to prepare healthy meals.
Benefits of Meal Prepping
Here are some of the benefits of preparing your meals beforehand:
- Purchasing your cooking ingredients in bulk saves a lot of money. It prevents you from eating out or spending money on fast food.
- You must prepare our meals in good quantity so that you don’t have to spend time preparing each meal repeatedly.
- It prevents food wastage: When we use ingredients in proper measurements and portions. It reduces unnecessary wastage of food.
- Meal preparation helps with portion control. This impacts your health most positively, as you gain all the necessary nutrients your body requires.
- By preparing the meal in advance and taking sufficient time, you can use healthy ingredients like dry fruits and seeds to prepare your food mindfully.
How to Start Meal Prepping at Home?
- The first step towards planning your meals is making a list of all the meals in a weekly cycle. Consider your overall schedule, health goals and diet preferences. Based on that, make a list of meals.
- Now, don’t overspend on snacks when you go for ingredient shopping. Instead, buy products that are rich in essential nutrients like carbohydrates, protein, healthy fats and dietary fibres.
- Give yourself enough time to properly prepare your meals on a regular basis.
- Choose those recipes for your week that are ready to cook and store in bulk. Stir-fries, poha, moong dal mangodi, and vermicelli are good options to consider.
- In most cases, people store their food in bad containers causing their food to decay and smell bad. Invest in good quality, reusable containers.
- You can cook large batches of proteins and vegetables. Roasting a few meal components and keeping chopped vegetables can be helpful in preparing your meals.
Tips for Success
- Think and prepare the recipes with minimum ingredients.
- To reduce food waste and increase the chances of variety, use ingredients that can be used in multiple dishes.
- To ensure an efficient meal preparation, keep your kitchen space clean.
- To prevent boredom, keep rotating the ingredients and your food choice every week.
- For nutritious and quick munching, keep nuts, dryfruits, freshly cut fruits, yoghurt and veggies.
Meal prepping can be a very important step in maintaining a healthy and balanced diet. You can cook nutritious food while saving time, money, and stress by deciding what to eat daily.
