1 Meal A Week
If you are anything like me, you know the struggle of meal prep. Meal prep can be long, can be exhausting, can make you even wonder why you’re doing this in the first place, but you know it will help you reach your goals.
In my last post, I talked about a, 5 Minute Challenge, to get you started on your health and fitness journey, and to reach your goals. Well, this post will be much like that post in that, if preparing an entire week of meals is something that is too overwhelming to be sustainable for you right now, then, we can take baby steps to making better routines and making meal prep easier for us, and less like a dreaded chore.
If you struggle coming up with a week worth of recipes, or even 5 days, or 3 for that matter, start smaller. Start with just 1 meal out of the week, that you specifically shop and prep for, to help kick start your journey. My advice would be to make this a dinner, but even if you want to practice meal prep for a healthier breakfast, that is absolutely amazing and you should start where you feel comfortable.
Things you should do, that will help you down the road, in making a full week of meal prep, starting 1 meal at a time and 1 day at a time:
• Choose what the meal will be for your meal prep
• Make a shopping list for all the groceries necessary to make that meal
• Have a recipe handy when shopping for and making the meal
• Keep a journal for each meal made
– record all of the above in your journal, also include prep time and difficulty level, record cook time, taste of meal and likelihood to make and eat again, and finally rate the meal overall from shopping to prep to cooking to finish, etc.
The goal of this, is to try and simplify the entire meal prep process, in order to take the stress of meal prep out of the equation. Start small, start simple, start with a good plan, and as this becomes more comfortable, increase the number of meals, whether that be in the same day or different dinners, to slowly make this a part of your routine.
The entire health and fitness journey can be intimidating, and as humans, it is very easy to get off track. The more simplified we can make certain processes, the easier we can make transitions into a new way of eating, a new way of living, the more sustainable we can make things for ourselves. Journaling the process can help make things a lot more sustainable, and can help us see what we were doing when things were going well, and exactly where things may have shifted. Our journal can become our manual or road map for how to be able get back on track and keep the process sustainable in doing so.
So, whether your journey is starting just 5 minutes of movement at a time, or if it is starting with 1 prepped meal at a time, let’s arm ourselves with the best weapons we can for making significant change on our health and fitness journey!