2. PICK THE MEALS

You need to decide which meal you are going to prepare first: Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner.

If you are preparing for a family, then prepping your dinner meals seems to be where you would get the most from your efforts. However, if you are single, or cooking for one or two people, then you may want to try to prepare breakfast or lunch meals first.

Ultimately, the choice is yours. You just want to think about it a little before you get started.

After that, you want to decide on the recipes you are going to prepare. 

You might not want to cook the same recipe for all three meals, although you can. But if you choose to prepare three dinner meals for your family, and they are all the same recipe, you might have a bit of a fight on your hands.

When choosing the recipes, think about how you want to balance the meals. 

For example, if you are trying to maintain specific macronutrient goals (proteins, fats, carbs) each day, that should factor into what recipes you choose. Knowing how each macronutrient converts into calories will also help provide more accurate information:

• 1g of Protein = 4 Calories
• 1g of Carbohydrates = 4 Calories
• 1g of Fat = 9 Calories

Using a kitchen scale can help you with things like this. 

They can also help you make sure you disperse each part of the meal evenly. And that brings me to my next point…

3. USE PROPER CONTAINERS

You must use the proper containers.(!) I really can’t stress this enough. Good storage containers are really the foundation of your meal prepping. 

How you choose to store your meals can make or break your meal prepping efforts.

You don’t want to simply throw everything into Tupperware bowls. That defeats the whole point of preparing things.

“What Makes a Good Container?”

For starters, you want to be able to divide each part of your meal. You don’t want foods cross-contaminating each other. 

So what you need is a container that’s airtight, with divided sections that are also airtight.

This feature alone makes for better, fresher, crispier tasting meals.

IN THE KITCHEN

Start off, like I said, with just a few meals. Don’t try to cook a whole week’s worth of meals in one sitting. You may want to do this later, as you get more comfortable, but for now, just try to find your meal-prepping-groove.

Focus on simple meals. Chicken is a favorite among many meal preppers because it can be cooked in a seemingly endless number of ways. It’s also easy to store and freeze.

With just a bit of chicken and a few vegetables, you can easily prepare three totally different meals.

Learn to Multitask: Remember that you can cook lots of different things at the same. Use your oven space to its fullest potential. There’s no need to place one thing in there at a time. Use multiple oven trays if it helps, or use aluminum foil to make dividers on one oven tray and multiply your efforts. Start with recipes that lend themselves to this type of cooking.

When planning your first shopping trip as a meal prepper, ask yourself if you have enough oven trays, aluminum foil and other utensils you might need.

Fruit: Fruit is a great way to dive into meal prepping. You can cut up different types of fruit and store them just like any meals you could prepare. You can easily make fruit salads or smoothies to go along with your prepped meals. Or you can simply start off with fruit preps only.

The Crockpot: Okay, this one is obvious, yet so many new meal preppers overlook it. The Crockpot has been a favorite among moms for decades. Use it to make simple, great-tasting meals then store them away.

Obviously I’m not going to tell you how to cook your meals (what am I, your mother-in-law?). You can find tons of recipes online and on our blog.

But hopefully, this guide has given all you need to get started with meal prepping so you can make life a little easier.

After all, that’s what meal prepping is all about.