Something I’ve been thinking about is how we can make our healthy dietary habits sustainable. If you think about it, when you start eating healthy there are a lot of boxes you must tick, and it takes effort just to prepare one single meal. Thus, if a healthy meal is hard to make we might put in the effort and cook it for 1 week, maybe 2, but then we’ll get frustrated and stop doing it.
This certainly happened to me when I started living alone cooking all my meals. I’m not the biggest fan of cooking but I am a big fan of healthy foods, I love seeing a colourful plate.
Back in 2019, I used to either stir fry some food, or I’d get some frozen food and put it in the oven – which I loved because it took so little work. I knew having to prepare food for lunch and dinner took a lot of time, and I didn’t like spending 30min in the kitchen chopping up the vegetables and stir-frying foods, but I didn’t know any better, so I kept doing it.
Discussing the trade-offs of meal prepping
It took me 4 years of cooking to realize there was a better way. I used to spend at least 40 min per day just preparing food, now I spend 1-2h per week!
Here’s how: Meal Preps!
This is seriously a game-changer and I highly encourage you to try it out. The benefits of meal prep go far beyond time management, they also include better health and a better routine. There are 5 main reasons why meal prepping is so great, check it out:
| Pros | Cons |
| You are guaranteed to eat healthy meals every day. | Eating the same lunch for 5 days in a row can get boring. |
| Saves you time every day. | Takes a big chunk of time to cook as you’re prepping 5/6 meals in one go. |
| Only cooking once or twice per week | |
| It’s cheaper because all the ingredients are bought in bulk and cooked in one sitting so there’s little waste too. | |
| You can take your meals to work and maintain your healthy diet and not be tempted to buy meal deals every day at work. |
I’ve been doing meal preps for about 8 months now, and it has honestly made a big difference in my life. Meal prepping or batch cooking is something we have all partially done. For example, when we cook rice, we don’t usually make it only for 1 sitting, do we? There are always leftovers and we can use it throughout the week.
Meal Prep example
If you’ve done it with rice you can do it with all the other foods too – including your vegetables and protein sources (which are ideally beans and pulses). Our plate can be broken down into 3 groups, the carb group, the vegetable group, and the protein group. I don’t like framing it this way because all foods have all 3 macronutrients, they just have different ratios of them, but it’s good for visual purposes.
- CARBS: That’s easy, you cook 1kg of rice (maybe around 400g of uncooked rice) and that lasts you for about 5 meals if you eat 200g per meal or around 7 meals if you eat 150g per meal.
- VEGETABLES: Here you have to test it and see how much vegetables you can eat, usually, the more the better, but for the sake of this exercise, I’ll give you average numbers. On my last meal prep, I boiled 1 whole broccoli (about 600g), I will eat 100g per meal so that will last me for 6 meals. Then I chopped up 3 bell peppers, sliced 250g of mushrooms, 3 whole onions and about 5 cloves of garlic and stir-fried them all together and added 1 can (240g) of black beans. That gave me about 750g of vegetables + beans, I want to eat 150g of it so that will last me for 5 meals.
- PROTEIN: For the protein source I stir-fried 450g of tofu with some more onion and garlic which gave about 500g of food – because I’ll eat 100g of it per meal that’s 5 meals sorted.
This took me about 1 HOUR to cook and now I have enough food for 5 meals, which covers my 5 working days which are honestly the harder ones to get through. If you make this meal on Sunday, you now have your 5 lunches for your workweek sorted!
If you want to take another hour to cook, you do the same as you just did with a different recipe and cook another 5 meals. That will be your dinner for your 5-day work week.
But what about the weekends? What will I eat then?
You could increase the portion sizes of each food when you’re cooking so that it covers the entire 7-day week. Or you can use the weekend to cook some fresh food for lunch and dinner, maybe go out for a meal, or order a semi-healthy takeaway.
It’s not like meal preps have to be your life, they are just a great tool to save time and guarantee healthy eating. You can eat a meal prep on 5 days of the week and on the other 2 you live a bit more freely, it’s not a prison!
LAST TIP
One thing I’m trying to improve on my meal prep journey is to develop a repertoire of simple recipes so that I vary my meal prep every week. I’ll always repeat recipes, but even if you weren’t doing meal preps you would eat the same thing many times in a month, it’s not like we are all professional chefs over here cooking new foods every week.
If you have 8 recipes you really love, that allows you to have a different meal every week. You use 2 recipes for the first week of the month (1 for lunch and 1 for dinner), then 2 new recipes for week n2, 2 for week n3, and the last 2 for week n4. Then you can repeat in a different order if you’d like, and you will slowly add new recipes as life goes on!
I hope you found this useful and that you give this meal prep system a go!
You can literally try the recipe I just did last week, just follow the steps I highlighted above and give it a go! If you don’t like tofu you just need to replace the 450g of tofu with a food of your liking (I always recommend plant-based protein for the disease-prevention benefits).
If you want to read a blog about how to overcome the challenges of starting a new diet I recommend you read this.
There are also services like Hello Fresh, that help you get started with the idea of meal-prepping, especially if you have no recipe ideas yet. Check out their page here.
All the best,
Martim
