Episode #8: Meal Prep & Planning + The Best Ingredients For A Week of Healthy Recipes
If there is one thing that can make or break my week, and either leave me feeling energized and on top of my life, or chaotic, stressy, and melodramatically in despair about ever managing to get it right, it’s how well I eat that week. What influences how well I eat on a given week? Whether or not I take 10 minutes at the start of that week to meal plan. I know it doesn’t sound like anything much, but it is a simple little organization trick that holds the magical power to not getting whollopped by chaos, stress, and too many unhealthy meals out every week.
If you take a few minutes at the start of every week to write down some simple meal ideas for yourself, you’ll save so much time thinking about meals, making last minute runs to the grocery store, staring into the fridge, or scrolling the foodora website for the inevitable takeout you’re going to order. Every time you need to decide how to feed yourself next, just look at your meal plan, hopefully open the fridge to some properly prepped ingredients if you’re really good, and you’re done. Decision made, and probably a healthier one than you would have made otherwise after work when you’re tired and not all that interested in cooking anymore.
Meal planning is a major adult organization skill that will make your life so much easier if you can manage to incorporate it into your life even some of the time. It will wind up saving you loads of time, valuable brain space, tonnes of money on lazy food purchases, and will keep you that much farther from experiencing decision fatigue and inhaling a bowl of popcorn for dinner when it all just becomes too much.
So, if you don’t already do some form of meal planning, I have four tips coming up to help you get started meal planning every week in a way that’s efficient, manageable, and doesn’t involve becoming a health guru and drinking celery juice every morning if that’s not your thing.
TIP #1: Meal plan once a week
Think about the upcoming 6 or 7 days and decide roughly what you’re going to eat. Pick the day you do your meal planning based on your own individual work and life schedule. Personally, I usually meal plan on Sundays or Mondays, depending on which day I take off, because this is when I do a whole overarching review of what’s coming up this week. I also usually have a fridge full of fresh food from the market on Sunday, so it just makes sense for me to look and see what I have to cook with and use up that week. I also try to do this on my day off because if I want to do a bit of meal prep to make my upcoming week even easier then I usually have time that day to prepare a few things, make some hummus, chop up some raw veggies, oven roast some vegetables, soak some beans etc.
It doesn’t matter when you do it, just pick a time that works for you, and do your best to stick with it for a few weeks. Sometimes I completely forget, and just jot some ideas down the next day, or honestly half the time it happens on a random day at a random time when I find myself starting at the fridge and feeling like I have no idea what to eat. That’s usually my cue to sit down, open my notebook, and put a few minutes of thought into what I want to eat for the next few days.
TIP #2: Make sure you plan for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks
Make sure you think about and write down what you’ll eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Don’t be lazy about this from the get-go! Morning you will be so much happier pre-coffee when you know that it’s a scrambled eggs and avocado morning without having to even think about it.
When you’re planning, make sure you take into account things like travel plans, work schedules, etc. so you can plan easier meals, faster meals, more nourishing meals etc. on your own schedule as needed. When you have a big project and need to work through lunches, make your life easier by planning meals that are simply leftovers from the night before, or can easily be thrown together from similar ingredients the night before while your dinner meal is also cooking. If you’ve got a few days off, maybe that’s the best time to plan a few new recipes you’ve been wanting to try, or make those meals that take a bit more prep than you usually have time for at the end of the day. Look at your whole upcoming calendar for the week, and plan meals that compliment what your life will be like that week.
TIP #3: Plan meals that work well as leftovers the next day
Make life easier for yourself by planning dinner meals that can be packed up as leftovers for lunch or even breakfast the next day. Sometimes it’s nice to make a fresh lunch for yourself when you’re working from home, or to go out with a friend for a social lunch, but more often than not it’s easiest and preferable to open up your lunch container and have something ready to go that takes no thought when you’re working. Whenever possible, I try to make plenty of extra dinner, so that it can be packed away for lunch the next day. Whether it’s pasta, soup, salad, stir fry, sandwiches. Get over feeling bored by leftovers, save yourself time and brain space, and just have dinner for lunch the next day sometimes.
TIP #4: Don’t overdo it and get all fancy!
Meal planning doesn’t mean you have to health it up with daily salads or long and involved dinner menus that you really should go to a French cooking school to pull off. This adulting tip is not about being healthier or doing more, it’s just about organizing yourself and reducing the strain on your brain for the rest of the week. Decision fatigue is a real thing, and this helps with that!
Start by planning meals that you actually make, and that are quick and easy for you to pull off. Overtime you can start to add in ideas that are more involved, or maybe a bit fresher and healthier, or that involve you learning a new recipe, but the main goal with meal planning is to make your life easier, so don’t take this tool and go right ahead using it to make your life harder by trying to be superman with the newest green keto whatever diet that you’ve been wanting to try!
Meal planning always makes people think of being unbearably healthy, or being boring and sticking to tupperwares of boiled chicken and broccoli, but that’s not it! I wish we were all taught how to create a simple meal plan as a basic organizational technique. In my opinion if you can keep from feeling completely overwhelmed by the basic need to feed yourself, then you can count that as a friggin successful week! You don’t need to be able to host your own vegan cooking channel on youtube to be able to do this!
As you get more and more used to meal planning, you can start to use it as a tool to make improvements and changes to your food lifestyle if you want to. You can use it plan to have healthier lunches instead of going out with people from work every day. Use it to plan a few vegetarian meals into your week, or a new cuisine night you’ve been wanting to try. Whatever you choose to do with it, meal planning will be a game changer when you start to make it a part of your routine.
Some of my favourite meal planning inspiration blogs and ingredients for a healthy week
As inspiration there are a few ingredients I try to always have on hand to make sure I can throw together some variation of healthy food every week. This varies seasonally, and I grow a big vegetable garden to supplement it in the summer, but I usually try to have some variation of arugula, spinach, eggs, avocados, almonds, chickpeas, sweet potatoes, green onions, red peppers, goat or feta cheese, garlic, tomatoes, radishes, zucchini, pulses like black beans or lentils, carrots, celery, bananas, nut butter, tofu, broccoli, cauliflower, etc. Personally I keep a variety of easy to cook vegetables on hand always, I try to vary it a bit, as well as some easy protein sources like beans, cheese, eggs, nuts, and I also always have a cupboard full of grains like different types of rice, millet, quinoa etc. Also for when I’m feeling lazy I keep easier foods on hand like celery and peanut butter, popcorn, crackers and dip etc. I love cooking, so my ingredients are quite varied, but I never let my fridge go without basic greens and a pile of veggies. My prep that makes eating really easy all week includes washing and chopping veggies in advance, for example kale all gets torn off the stem, radishes have the tops cut off etc. and I usually try to bake a few veggies like cauliflower or sweet potato, as well as cook some ingredients like chickpeas or lentils in advance so I can make easy salads or hummus platters all week.
Linked Resources
Green Kitchen Stories: https://greenkitchenstories.com/
Nutrition Stripped: https://nutritionstripped.com/
Deliciously Ella: https://deliciouslyella.com/
Oh she glows: https://ohsheglows.com/
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