Meal Prepping, How to Plan for your Week Ahead

Meal prepping, planning and preparing one’s meals for the week ahead of time, has become very trendy lately. My husband and I meal prep all of our meals every Sunday after we do our weekly grocery trip. Before we head to the grocery, we sit down together and develop our meal plans for the week, what meals to have throughout the week for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks. Once we have this plan laid out, we can then list all of the ingredients onto our grocery list to help ensure that we don’t forget anything while shopping. Upon returning home from the grocery, we cook most of our food items right away and line up all of our Tupperware to fill with the freshly cooked food for the week.

Pre-cooking and portioning food out into Tupperware containers ahead of time helps to keep our overall calorie consumption and portion control in check throughout the week, without having to think about it at every meal. It has been shown that meal prepping can encourage having a healthier diet and less likelihood of becoming overweight or obese.

This is likely because meal prepping allows for us to consider the proper meal sizes and portions for ourselves ahead of time rather than in the moment, when we may be hungry causing our eyes to be bigger than our stomachs. Over time, these pre-determined portion sizes learned from meal prepping could help us to become more aware of what proper portion sizes are for us, compared with the typically larger portions that we are exposed to in restaurants in the United States. In addition, because we are planning ahead, rather than in the moment when we might be hungry, we are able to think more clearly and choose healthier food items to include in our meals throughout the week. One more advantage to planning out and cooking all of your meals for the week is that it helps keep us from spending extra money on convenience meals, like fast food, throughout the week, since we will already have a meal that’s ready to go during our busy workdays.

Our favorite go-to meals for meal prep are those meals that can easily be made in bulk all together and then portioned out into our Tupperware. Some examples of this would be: chicken and veggie stir fry over rice or quinoa, baked Italian lemon chicken and roasted veggies, or turkey taco salads with fajita veggies. Happy meal prepping!

What are some of your favorite meal prep ideas?