Meal Prep for REAL schedules – The Time Issue Solved

Meal Prep for REAL schedules – The Time Issue Solved

 Meal Prep for REAL schedules – The Time Issue Solved

     As a small-business owner/entrepreneur, personal trainer, and hell, a human being in this digital/social media age, time is a rare and precious resource. Let’s face it, if you are reading this you probably have too little of it as do many of my clients who are also CEOs, parents, spouses, students etc. Meal prep is a way of reclaiming a lot of time normally spent cooking throughout the week, going out to restaurants because you don’t have time to cook or to simply change your poor eating habits using as little time as possible.  So time and timing is the first thing you must consider when preparing your food ahead of time.

Step 1) Take a good inventory of your daily routine/schedule each week and answer the following:

• What days are you the busiest and what days do you have the least obligatory demands on your time?
• Using your answer from question 1, are there multiple days where you have enough time to prepare/cook food or would 1 or 2 days better suit your schedule?
• Of the less busy times you identified, which ones do you tend to be exhausted or less motivated/likely to cook?

Step 2) Create your meal prep schedule using the answers above. Keep these things in mind

• Weekends tend to be the best day for folks who have a typical workweek schedule. You have more personal time and those blocks of time tend to be much larger, and of course, you aren’t on your way to work or exhausted from a day of work.
• Try to keep the number of times you prep/cook food from scratch to a minimum, I would advise no more than 3 days/times because each additional cooking session makes the process less time efficient.
• Be realistic! Only you know how tired you are at certain times of the day and week and how motivated you will be when you have had a bad day at work or things come up. Setting up your schedule should line up with your current lifestyle as much as possible to give yourself the greatest chance of success and sticking with it long term!

Step 3) Schedule time for grocery shopping to ensure you have what you need prior to your meal prep session

• If you are like me and like to shop at different stores for different items or simply want to avoid the inconvenience of crossing town to go to the store or battling crowds and want to save time, services like Instacart offer a great solution to have your groceries delivered to your door within an hour or two or even scheduled for delivery ahead of time. Yes there is a small fee for the service and tipping the driver but the way I see it, saving me 2-3 hours of time and hassle driving around town to different stores, waiting in lines etc is worth the additional few bucks. Plus you won’t be as tempted to buy things, not on your list.

Keep in mind that when you are first starting out with meal prep, things tend to take a bit longer to prepare as you get used to cooking larger portions. But don’t worry, each time will get faster and faster as you develop your own system and put a lot of the tricks and strategies I’ll give you into practice!

-Filipe Vosough