The basic/best meals to prep are stews, chilis, pasta dishes, curries, sheet pan meals, stir frys, burrito bowls, enchiladas, and casseroles. Good thing we got you covered there! We have lots of free recipes tested for meal prep here and over 600 in the WWL Meal Prep Program for members. You want to choose big batch meals that will hold up in the fridge for a few days or freeze well. I love meal prepping, but you can totally make a meal plan even if you DON’T meal prep! Or, you can do a mix of both meal prepping ( like just meal prepping breakfasts) and making one-off meals for dinner and eating leftovers for lunch. What recipes to choose largely comes down to your lifestyle. It’s easy to fall down a Pinterest rabbit hole and before you know it, you’ve spent 3 hours looking at decorative fruit pies. This part of the meal planning process is the most fun but also takes the longest. Without this information, you won’t know how many servings you’ll need or how much food to buy. The goal here is to count the exact number of meals you need for the next week. It’s better to leave weekends open!ĭo: plan meals you always struggle to come up with ideas for.ĭon’t: try to make your social schedule fit your meal plan. I recommend only planning meals for Monday-Friday when we’re busier with work or school. Leave some of the meals open so you can be spontaneous or avoid over-planning if something comes up. It’s so important to not plan EVERY meal. Or maybe you’re not social, but do enjoy takeout during the week. Maybe you don’t have set plans yet, but are you the kind of person that randomly gets together with people on weeknights? If yes, anticipate that! If you know you might eat out a few times after work, don’t plan too many dinners at home. Do you have any work meals, dinner dates, or happy hours to plan around? Since our schedules can change every week, it’s important to look at the week ahead and see what you have planned already. As you probably know, Workweek Lunch doesn’t support intentional weight loss and everything we talk about here is to help people like you create a system around food to get more out of life.Īre you ready to make a meal plan step-by-step? These steps will work if you’re meal planning for one or more! Let’s do it together.Ĭlick here to download our free meal planning template! Step One: Look At Your Calendar It’s also why meal planning isn’t just a thing dieters do. Related: Meal Planning with Executive Dysfunction / ADHD You’re also saving money and reducing food waste in the process! You’re taking care of future you by getting ahead of all the stress that comes with figuring out what to buy, cook and eat every day. This is why meal planning, while not sexy, is a form of self-care. And you will always have to come up with meal ideas every day, which takes a lot of mental energy on top of everything else we have to worry about.You’ll probably eat more takeout or bowls of cereal for dinner – which is great if you can afford it or feel great eating cereal for dinner every day (hey, no judgment!) but that’s not the case for most of us.You’re likely to waste the food you come home with since you had no idea what to do with it in the first place.You’ll spend a lot more time in the grocery store, wandering aisles, trying to come up with meals on the fly.Skipping the meal planning process usually makes life more hectic. But sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth since we do have to eat multiple times per day! I am all for being spontaneous with food when it makes sense. I wish I had a guide like this when I first started! I had to learn all of this the hard way. Without a plan, I just feel lost! In this post, you’ll learn my step-by-step process for meal planning for beginners. Meal planning is one of my all-time favorite weekly routines, and it doesn’t have to be intimidating even if you are a beginner! Every Friday, I sit down and follow the exact steps below to create a meal plan for myself that’s interesting, realistic, full of variety, and most importantly, something I look forward to.
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