Are you ready to take your nutrition to the next level? The ultimate in managing your diet is meal prep. With meal prepping, you will easily hit your calorie and macro goals, and save time, money and energy for the gym.
Below, Austin Alexander Burridge, a professional fitness guru, shows how to incorporate meal planning into daily and weekly regimens to enhance fitness goals.
At its purest, meal prepping is just preparing food in bulk, to be eaten over time.
Here’s how it helps:
Accurate nutrition without having to track:
Are you sick of weighing all of your food before you eat? Or are you guessing because you don’t have the time? There is a better way.
With meal prepping, your week is blocked out into meals, though that doesn’t mean you have to eat the same thing every day. Instead, either every meal has identical calories and macronutrients or fits into one of a few categories.
You end up eating whichever meals you want, so long as you eat the same number, or, for example, two ‘A’s, two ‘B’s and a ‘C.’
As long as you stick to it, your nutrition is exact every day, without weighing a thing!
Huge time savings:
All the fuss of weighing and measuring happens in one block, and because cooking in batches is more efficient, you make that time back.
Without meal prepping, if you eat four meals a day, that’s fifty-six meals you have to prepare each fortnight individually. If you break that down to eight meal options, you can make seven at a time.
It is so much faster to compress all of that to an afternoon of meal-prepping once every two weeks, or even once a month. After that one effort, all you need to do is quickly microwave a meal, or also take it straight from the box, depending on what it is.
More interesting meals:
The time savings don’t just give you more time in the week; they also make your food taste better. While it might be too much effort to make up a spice-mix to quickly cook a chicken breast or two, it’s much less hassle when you’re roasting fourteen or more of them.
With a much higher return on prep-time, it suddenly doesn’t seem like so much work to make exciting food.
It sounds like a paradox, but making your food in bulk can often increase the variety of what you eat.
Lower food bill:
Buying in bulk is generally cheaper, and this applies to food. When you buy enough for up to a month of eating, you start to see savings. Meal prepping also helps justify the drive to a wholesale club, like Costco, where they sell in larger, cheaper amounts.
Eliminated temptation:
Not only does the food itself become cheaper, but because you shop less often, you are much less tempted to buy junk food or other unplanned items that add expense to your grocery bill.
This will compound your savings and help keep your diet strict and your gains multiplying.
Better supplement compliance:
Once you have everything else nailed down, good supplements help make the difference to your fitness regimen. Unfortunately, they can be tricky to remember.
Meal prepping helps here, too. If you categorize your meals, you can include your supplements, so you don’t have to deal with them separately. Never forget your morning creatine again!
Summary:
Meal prepping gives you the following benefits:
- Simplifies nutritional management.
- Saves you time.
- Justifies tastier food.
- Saves you money.
- Help keep you on track with your diet.
- Makes supplements easier to remember.
Meal prepping has several advantages, even if you’re not involved in fitness. If you are, it’s almost a no-brainer.
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