5 Tips to Meal Prep Effectively

If you haven’t started already, prepping your meals at the start of the week is the best way to ensure you stick to your macro’s during the day.

Fail to prepare – prepare to fail. Yep. Who hasn’t heard that before, right?

But it’s true. Whatever your fitness goal, if you aren’t correctly prepared you will find it more difficult to achieve it. So here are 5 tips to help you make sure you’re prepping effecitvely.

1. Get your ingredients in advance

It’s much easier to meal prep if you get all of your ingredients beforehand. The best way to do this is to plan your meals for the week and make a list of all of the ingredients you need then, schedule time – on a Sunday for example – to prepare your meals.

2. Prep according to your macro requirements

There are many ways to count your macro’s and figure out what your requirements are, the details of which can be found here. The key thing to remember is to prep according to your fitness goal. If you want to lose weight you should be eating fewer calories than you burn, and if you want to build muscle you should be on a calorie surplus.

3. Make use of an app to track your meals and macros

My favourite macro-tracking app to use is MyFitnessPal. It allows you to create recipes or bulk add ingredients just from the barcodes, and that’s before you pay for the premium version. It makes it much easier to track what you’re eating and when. When meal prepping, add your meals to your app. If you do this beforehand you will find it much easier to plan snacks throughout the day as well, making it much easier to stick to your macro’s.

4. Keep things simple

Don’t try to go overboard, trying the fanciest of recipes when you first meal prep. Stick to a few basic recipes for the first couple of meal preps and then go from there. You can start to look for fancier recipes once you’re in your routine of planning and prepping. The key thing here is to get your routine in order before overloading yourself. You don’t want to start out feeling like you’ve taken on too much and prep is taking too much time.

5. Don’t eat chicken and rice every. Single. Day.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of benefits to eating chicken and rice daily. But my point is, don’t eat the same thing day in, day out. It will get boring very quickly and you’ll find yourself not only not wanting to meal prep, but not wanting to eat it either.

Basic things like herbs and spices can make a huge difference to your meals. Try adding some garlic and herbs or Cayenne pepper (sparingly!) to your chicken. Or if you’re feeling adventurous, add a sauce. It won’t taste the same again!

Most importantly …

Enjoy. Meal prep can get monotonous after a while, so make sure to keep mixing it up with different flavours and different foods.

And don’t be hugely restricted by your macro’s every day. They’re a guideline that can be bent every now and again.

Happy prepping!

A.x