5 Simple Steps to Meal Prep

Meal prep & planning is crucial to sticking with your healthy meal plan.  Why?  Because getting hungry and not having anything prepared is failure waiting to happen.  Working full-time, while teaching group fitness and building a fitness company can lead to super busy days.  It’s imperative to find ways to simplify meal planning.  Through trial and error, I realized what works for me is keeping it simple.

• Tip #1  Keep it simple.   Pick 1-2 options for each meal of the day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner plus healthy snacks) and stick with it for the week.  You’ll spend less at grocery store and it takes the guesswork out of deciding what to eat each day.

• Tip #2 Keep breakfast quick and portable. If you’re like me, you like to get your workouts in first thing in the morning before the day gets away from you.  I rarely have enough time in the mornings to actually cook a breakfast.   So my breakfast of choice is a healthy smoothie of  protein powder, raw oatmeal, wheat germ and a piece of fruit.  I can drink it in the car on my way to my first appointment.

• Tip #3 Prepare 3 days of meals at a time. The worst part about cooking is all the clean up afterwards.  So I do it twice a week on Sundays and Wednesdays.  I use a food scale to measure out portions and store complete meals in Tupperware bowls.  Each night, I put meals #2 and #3 and some healthy snacks in my lunch bag so it’s ready to grab when I head out the door in the morning.

• Tip #4 Keep healthy meal replacements and snacks readily available. I keep a jar of protein powder at work and drink it every day as meal #4 with an apple or almonds.  I always keep snacks like yogurt and granola at work as well.

• Tip #5 Do grocery shopping for the week on Sundays.  My Saturdays are normally busy getting all the stuff done I couldn’t do during the week.  So Sunday is my day to wind down, grocery shop and meal prep. I plan my meals for the upcoming week on Saturday and go grocery shopping Sunday morning.  I only buy enough food to last me through the week so my veggies and fruit stay fresh.  I have a free app on my iPad (GroceryIQ) I use to keep my grocery list.  It’s like a database of all the foods I normally buy and makes it simple to build my grocery list each week.