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7 Super-Efficient Meal Prepping Tips For Healthy Homemade Meals

08Apr2021
7 Super-Efficient Meal Prepping Tips For Healthy Homemade Meals
SHEROES Work From Home Opportunities

Meal prepping can cut down on food preparation time and make life easier. Here are 7 super-efficient meal prepping tips for healthy homemade meals.

As a busy mom, meal prepping or meal preparation can take up a large part of your life, especially if you prefer healthy homemade meals.

But you can save a lot of time and effort and improve the quality of your life by planning and preparing meals to cook at home in advance.

Today it’s a rare person who doesn’t understand the strong link between proper nutrition and good health. Many women are deciding to change their food habits and prepare healthier homemade meals for themselves and their families.

But, it does little good to know about the importance of healthy nutrition when we don’t have time to even think about healthy food preparation and meal prepping, let alone do it regularly.

Considering our long hours at work, the idea of using up our precious free time to plan meals and practice various food preparation techniques to cook homemade meals for the entire week sounds crazy.

Food prep meals, ready to cook meals, or home-cooked meals delivered at home by meal prep services are often the “go-to” choice of busy people or those who live alone and search for “meal prep near me”.

Even when we know that living on microwave meals and fast food isn’t the best thing we can do for ourselves, we may not have access to a good meal prepping guide to help us get started.

Whether you’re looking for dinner meal prep for weight loss or just a star anise substitute, there are many excellent sources of nutritional information where you can find food preparation and meal prepping tips to get you started.

What Is Meal Prepping?

Meal prepping or meal preparation is exactly what it sounds like. The process of meal prepping implies that you reserve a chunk of time once a week to prepare homemade meals for the upcoming week.

Food preparation and meal preparation are not new fads. On the contrary, these techniques have existed as long as humans have been around.

However, meal prep only began to gain popularity of late because more people understand that healthy meal prepping helps them avoid junk food cravings, eat healthier, and also save money and time along the way.

It is necessary to point out that meal planning and meal prepping aren’t the same, despite plenty of people thinking otherwise.

Meal planning refers to searching for the best meal prepping recipes for the week, while meal prepping refers to setting aside the time required to prepare the meals.

Meal Prepping Tips

7 Super-Efficient Meal Prepping Tips For Healthy Homemade Meals

Now that you know the meaning of meal prepping is to prepare food in advance, here are some suggestions for how to start meal preparation and food preparation of your homemade meals.

Keep in mind that these are some of the ideas we found most useful. You can use them if you feel they work for you or take them as a source of inspiration to come up with your own meal prepping techniques.

These super-efficient meal prepping tips will help you with healthy food preparation and meal preparation as part of your self-care routine.

1. Get the right containers

If you’re serious about healthy meal prepping or freezable meal prep, consider investing in reusable containers, as basic food preparation and storage is an important part of meal prepping.

Even though high-quality food storage containers with antibacterial properties can be a bit expensive, you’ll quickly see that they’re worth every cent, especially for baby food preparation and storage.

Make sure you get transparent containers, so you don’t have to open them each time to see what is inside. Do your best to keep them organized to avoid having to continually search for appropriate lids.

Femora food storage containers
Buy Femora food storage containers

2. Start small and stick with it

It may be surprising, but one of the best meal prepping ideas we came across is to start small. It is quite normal to be super enthusiastic when you decide to completely change your eating habits and prepare homemade meals.

Whether you need healthy food prep or diet meal prep for weight loss or meal prep for managing certain health conditions these are often newly cultivated habits that come with a learning curve. Most people have no meal prepping how-to knowledge of proper meal preparation techniques.

If you’ve never planned a single meal until now, it is unlikely that you’ll suddenly know how to plan five or ten of them. In fact, if you try to do too much, it’s more likely that you’ll get overwhelmed and be tempted to give up altogether.

So, instead of prepping for the entire week, start by making easy prep meals for dinner two or three nights in advance until you get a hang of it. Once you’re into the meal prepping habit, you can step it up and plan your meals for the entire week.

3. Find the best foods to cook at home

Now that you know the benefits of meal prepping and have decided to make food at home, you need to find out which are the best foods to cook at home and start creating a collection of fun and delicious recipes, such as what to prepare for breakfast every day.

Collecting delicious meal prep recipes for homemade meals you love will make the entire process far more enjoyable. You can find many recipes in the Cooking, Food, Recipes and More Community on SHEROES. As you’re testing different recipes, keep track of those you like the most.

Avoid choosing complicated recipes with ingredients that are virtually impossible to find in your area. Keep things simple and find out the local meal prep ingredient prices so you can manage your food budget better.

If you’re doing meal prep for one person, you won’t have much to worry about, but if you’re cooking for the whole family, remember to factor in meal prep for picky eaters or meal prep for toddlers, so you can find the best meal prep dishes for them.

Foods To Cook At Home

4. Know your meal prepping time

If you’re starting out with food preparation for the first time and are a complete beginner in the area of meal prepping, you’ll probably not have a practical understanding of the time it takes to prepare certain kinds of foods.

For example, the time it takes for cooking dried beans or cooking corn in microwave ovens is very different from the amount of time it takes to cook potato in microwave ovens or the time it takes to make an oven-cooked chicken breast.

The time that goes into preparing chicken wings can also vary a lot from that for fish preparation or meat preparation. If you’re short of time, you can find no-cook meal prep recipes that cut down on your cooking time drastically.

Browse meal prep websites to learn tips and hacks for proper cooking of food staples – such as the cooking time for rice or the easy way to cook rice or the best ways for storing cooked rice – as rice is a staple in every Indian home.

Once you have enough practice and knowledge of the different food preparation and cooking times for each ingredient, you’ll know how much time you need to set aside every few days or every weekend to plan your meal prepping routine.

5. Manage your shopping list smartly

Grocery shopping can be a tedious task, but if you plan it well, it doesn’t have to be. If you’re doing most of your shopping in one supermarket, you probably know where everything is and can organize your list accordingly.

But the best way to reduce the time you spend shopping and stay safe (during a pandemic) is to shop online using one of the many grocery apps. Another way to save time shopping is to add the ingredients to your shopping list the second you notice you’re running out of them.

If you have a smart virtual assistant device like Alexa, you can get it to store your grocery list and place an order when you’re running out of ingredients, so you don’t forget what you need to buy for the upcoming week.

Food Preparation

6. Organize your kitchen well

An organized workspace can make all the difference to your meal preparation and food preparation techniques, especially when you have to spend five or six hours doing it every week.

The French have an interesting concept called mise en place, literally meaning “put in place.” It means that you take everything you need for your food preparation and put it at hand reach.

I like to have my cooking playlist and Bluetooth speaker while meal prepping because it keeps me going. Do you have something that keeps your spirits up while meal prepping?

7. Invest in handy gadgets

There isn’t a single reason why we should not profit as much as possible from the era of the Digital Revolution. Our grandmothers, and maybe even our mothers, had to do everything manually, but with all our super modern appliances, we don’t.

There are so many options out there for useful kitchen appliances and handy food prep gadgets that can make our lives easier, and they come at a wide range of prices, so there’s something for everyone.

I have to admit that after trying these food prep tips, meal prepping for healthy homemade meals has become far less challenging. Is it the same for you?

Once again, remember that these ideas are there to inspire you. If they seem too daunting for you, remember that there are plenty of other things you can do to start changing your food preparation routine.

Perhaps you already have some food preparation and meal prepping tips for healthy homemade meals that you would like to share? Do let us know what meal preparation tips work for you in the comments below.

But before you do that, download the SHEROES only-women app and share your meal prep recipes with our recipe sharing community.

Share Your Recipes

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Also read:

How To Meal Prep For Beginners

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