Meal prepping is an awesome way to save money and time. Buying in bulk and knowing exactly what you need to buy will help you save money, and prepping for multiple meals at a time will save you time. And who doesn’t want more time and money? And the best part is, it’s really not that hard. With a little planning, you’ll be putting stress-free meals together in no time.

6 Benefits Of Meal Prepping

There are many reasons to become a Meal Prepper. Below are a few of the main ones.

1. Helps Remove Temptation 🍟

Planning your meals ahead of time can provide the focus you need to resist temptation at the grocery store and when tempted to eat out. When you’re at the store, you’re only looking for two things: the items that are on your list, and any sale items that could be relevant in the near future, or that you already use a lot.

For example, if you’re planning on chicken for this week and ground beef for next week, but you see ground beef on sale while you’re out shopping, it’s not a bad idea to dip into next week's budget to get the beef right then. If you already know you’re going to buy it, there's no reason to wait until next week when it could be back to its normal price. Just be sure to spend less the next week on groceries to make up the difference. Along with this, if something you use a lot is on sale, like butter or cheese, stock up and freeze it. No reason to skimp when you can be saving your future self a tidy sum.

When it comes to eating out, a simple policy is to plan to eat out on a certain day of the week as a special occasion, and the rest of the time, you eat at home. Having a meal plan and prepped ingredients in place will help make this more realistic.

The key in all of this is making the choice of what you’re going to do ahead of time so you can stay consistent when tempted to go against your values.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR SIMPLE EATS PROGRAM HERE

2. Saves Money 🤑

We all know buying bulk is a great way to save money, but unless you’re buying bulk strategically, you can wind up breaking the bank buying twenty pounds of ten different items, or will find a lot of food going to waste. Instead, buy in bulk strategically. If you know you’re making chili one week, and tacos the next, buy the larger package of ground beef and enjoy the bulk discount. And like we talked about when removing temptation, you’ll be more focused on what you buy, and that will save you money as well. We all know how deadly those impulse buys can be.

For more thoughts on how to save money on your grocery budget, check out ⇒ our blog on the topic.

3. Saves Time ⏰

Doing bulk meal prep is a huge time saver. Processing fruit and veggies or cooking up a lot of meat at a time allows you to experience huge returns for only a few extra minutes’ work. It takes hardly any extra time to cook two pounds of chicken versus one, but if you were to cook those two pounds separately on two different days, you’d see how those extra, unnecessary minutes spent cooking would add up throughout the week to steal your evenings.

4. Relieves Stress 💆🏽‍♀️

Knowing you have your meals planned out for the week takes so much stress out of cooking. It’s enough work to make the meal itself. You shouldn’t have to scramble right before a meal to try and scrounge something up. Or worse, just decide to eat out because it’s too much hassle. By planning ahead, you have the ingredients, and you know what you’re making and when. Now it’s just a matter of doing it.

5. Helps With Quality Control 🎯

Making your own meals means you know what’s in them. Eating out or buying pre-made meals doesn’t allow you that luxury. When you buy the ingredients yourself, you can decide how healthy you want your diet to be with no hidden unhealthy foods sneaking in without you knowing it. That’s what makes this method so perfect for your long-term lifestyle diet.

6. Helps Improve Cooking Skills 👨🏽‍🍳

Nothing will help your cooking skills improve like practice. When you cook several times a week, you’ll find the cooking tasks that used to be frustrating or time-consuming can actually become easy, and even fun. With your meals planned and your ingredients prepped, you’ll be able to spend more time enjoying cooking and perfecting the art versus stressing that dinner won’t be ready in time.

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Focus On Meal Prep Ingredients Over Full Meals

We’ve already talked about a few reasons meal prepping is beneficial. Now let’s look at it more practically.

When it comes to cooking, there are two schools of thought. One ops for planning every meal down to the last bite, and the other shuns any form of plan or schedule in favor of what feels good in the moment. As you can probably guess, there are downsides to both of these approaches.

The highly structured approach doesn’t leave room for the crazy and unexpected, which is part of life. This leads to even more stress when the structure is broken, and can lead to more waste as well when you have meals that go uneaten because a friend invited you out, or you couldn’t make it home in time for dinner, and had to pick up something along the way. This approach also leaves no room for cravings or emotions, assuming you can eat the same things over and over on a rotation without going crazy.

The flexible approach causes stress because you don’t know what you’re going to eat next. What you thought was freedom turns out to be a nightmare, and most often results in meals that take forever to prepare, are unhealthy, or are expensive.

That’s why we propose a third option that blends these two. Prepping ingredients instead of meals meets the needs of both types of people while minimizing many of the downsides. By prepping your meal ingredients ahead of time, you cut down on stress because there’s always something to eat in the fridge that can be heated up quickly. But it also leaves enough flexibility for you to mix and match, and eat whatever tickles your fancy in the moment.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR SIMPLE EATS PROGRAM HERE

How To Prep Ingredients Instead Of Meals

So how do you prep ingredients instead of meals? Well first you do need to have some meals in mind before you start prepping. The goal is to prep with foods that are versatile and don’t fall into too narrow of a category. To help with this, try cooking in the basic categories of veggies, complex carbs, and protein. You can also narrow this down more by focusing on either breakfast, lunch, or dinner. For now, we’ll focus on dinner.

Veggies that work well for dinner, while also being versatile, are roasted veggies, fresh veggies like sliced zucchini or spinach you can fry up quickly, or veggie sticks you can add on the side to any meal. When you prep these veggie ingredients, it gives you the flexibility to add them to whatever other meal you’d like.

To incorporate complex carbs into dinner, try adding sweet potatoes (sliced or cubed give you more options), rice, quinoa, and/or beans. You can cook all of these ahead of time, and reheat them for whatever meal you need them for. Just make enough to cover you and your family’s needs for the week.

Protein is pretty easy, too. To add this one in, try shredded or cubed chicken, ground beef, or salmon. Again, make enough for several meals, and then portion out and reheat whatever you need for each meal.

By using this method, you can mix and match between all of the ingredients you’ve prepared, and have delicious, well-balanced combinations for every meal with so much less worry and fuss.

Committing to a new way of meal prep can be scary, but here’s what we recommend. Give it a try for two weeks and see how it goes. Give yourself time to work out the kinks and come up with a system, and then see where you are at the end of two weeks.

How to get started today....😋

➤ For two weeks, try setting aside an hour and a half to two hours once a week for meal prep, and see how it goes

➤ Check out our ⇒ Simple Eats Course

➤ List 5 reasons why meal prepping would work for you

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR SIMPLE EATS PROGRAM HERE

Conclusion

We all love saving time and money. By planning ahead and prepping meals, you’ll not only get your evenings and some hard earned cash back, but you may even find yourself enjoying preparing and making meals. The bottom line is, you can do this. Give it a try. You may just fall in love with this new way of doing things.

Share your own tips and tricks for meal prep in the comments.