Meal planning and prepping may seem overwhelming. Especially when you see so many influencers and others pulling out what seems like 80 containers, 100+ ingredients, and making the same meal for days on end.
It doesn’t have to be like that!
Meal planning and prepping can look many different ways and you have to find the strategy that works best for you and your family’s time, budget, and appetites.
If you don’t enjoy eating leftovers every day, that’s ok! You can still meal prep and make it easier to prepare your meals and stick to your current goals. Check out my ideas below for how to do this!
I used to be a meal prepper with all of the containers, but then I got bored. I stopped doing it because I was tired of eating the same thing every day of the week and I felt like I was wasting a lot of food.
I would make something for supper and there would be leftovers. Instead of being able to eat our leftovers in a timely fashion, we would already have lunch made from meal prep. Then I would make something else for supper (because of boredom, I couldn’t eat the same thing for lunches every day and also supper!) My creativity in the kitchen was feeling a bit squashed.
So, I changed our style. I planned to make healthy suppers that would also be good for our lunches and taking to work. Both my husband and I are fortunate enough to be able to warm our lunches up at work, this lead to us not wasting as much food and also being able to have more variety.
My meal prep strategy now includes – whenever I have a vegetable out for a meal, I look ahead at our week and see when or if I need it again, then I cut up extra of that vegetable. An example of this would be onions.
Or for snacks on the weekends between games, I am cutting up celery and carrots anyway, so I do the whole package. This way snack veggies are all ready to go and I only made one mess!
Prep the things you can when you can, you will be amazed at how the small parts of a recipe being done will save so much time throughout the week!
