Meal Prep – An Underappreciated Success Habit!
So, If you’re here I’m assuming that you want to improve your health, get fitter/stronger, look better & maybe even boost your mental performance?
I’m also gonna assume you’ve had/are having some challenges with some aspects of your fitness/health journey?
Lastly, I’m gonna assume you’re a reasonable & practical person that wants to make this journey as time efficient and easy to follow as possible?
Okay good.
So today we are gonna be talking meal prep.
There is no question that when it comes to your nutrition, the BEST OPTION is that you cook ALL your own food:
- It gets you results in the fastest time possible
- Guarantee’s you healthiest quality of food because you know what you’re eating & how it’s cooked
- It’s the most cost effective
Still, many people are not convinced.
They say ‘oh isn’t your food really bland and tasteless like that’ or ‘I don’t want to spend my whole Sunday cooking’ haha.
Firstly none of these are true.
Secondly, let me break it down.
I bet your day looks something like the following:
Wake up around 7.45 (just because you woke up once @ 6am don’t try and claim you do that on a regular lol).
Breakfast: you either have toast or porridge or you buy a cheeky something on the go with your coffee.
In about 2 hours you’re hungry again because your breakfast wasn’t particularly nutritious.
You spend about 15 mins thinking about whether you can firm it until lunch or if you should go out and get a quick snack.
Lunchtime comes, now you’re spending another 15 mins deciding what you ‘fancy’ or whether you are ‘being healthy’ today or not.
Finally it comes to the end of the day and because you’re in a healthy mood, you’ve decided to cook dinner.
You take a 20 min detour to Waitrose to pick up some ingredients, then you go home and begin cooking a ‘healthy pasta’ from scratch.
About 60-90 mins later, after finely cutting the garlic, allowing the time for sauce to really have flavour & spiralising the courgette for your healthy pasta, you finally get to sit and eat 🙂
‘Oh crap is that time its 8.30pm already!’
You’ve basically spent 2.5 – 3 hours in just one day either thinking about what to eat, sourcing the ingredients or cooking the food!
Let’s be honest that is a crazy waste of time especially if you’re a busy person like pretty much 99% of us are nowadays.
And on top of that you’re not even hitting your goals as well as you’d like either.
Let me show you how your day would be different if you meal prepped
(approx 3 hours PER WEEK)
Wake up, breakfast is overnight oats with Greek yoghurt and blueberries.
Snack is some yummy carrot sticks + 5 almonds; that should keep you going till lunch.
Because you’re not spending ages contemplating what it is that you’re going to eat, you can get a workout in during your lunch break
and still have time to sit down and eat your venison burgers, oven baked wedges and homemade coleslaw…yummy.
Works done and because you’re not spending your whole evening cooking/food shopping, you can catch up with a friend
and still be home by 7.30pm to enjoy that healthy pasta you made the other night.
The bolognaise sauce reheats easily and still tastes good (arguably better) a few days after cooking.
Now how much better was that?
- You’ve eaten well
- Had time to train
- Met a friend
- Still had time to relax and enjoy the rest of the evening.
I don’t know about you but the second day definitely appears to be the more enjoyable one.
So here’s the thing about us ‘fitness people’ you see online with physiques or fitness levels you admire, yes its partly because we prioritize and value health more the average person
BUT we also have a bunch of very practical habits in place to help us be successful consistently
and yes you guessed it…meal prepping is one of them.
So if you’ve struggled with consistency with food, meal prepping might be an absolute game changer that you need to start exploring.
In the next blog I’m gonna give my exact protocol for how I do my meal prep in less than 3 hours per week!
All the best,
Alex
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