Meal Prepping for Weight Loss

Meal prepping for weight loss can be a healthy option for anyone to do and for people who work 9-to-5 jobs, it may be the most important method for losing weight. The meals you can’t be at home for are the ones that tend to be the least healthy. Most people resort to quick food rather than healthy food, plus who doesn’t want something good to eat while they’re working away in an office or onsite. 

Managing your nutrition and calories tends to be much more impactful on actual weight loss than exercise. (This doesn’t mean you get to be lazy though) If you’ve struggled with making progress on weight management, a change in diet may be the necessary step. If you have genuinely stuck to healthy diets and can’t lose weight, speak with a nutritionist or your doctor for additional information on your body’s particular needs.

Meal prepping for weight loss is a great method for adjusting your meal routine and eating habits to be more consistently healthy. For some people, any deviation from a diet can negate weeks of effort and having healthy food ready to eat helps keep you on your plan. This is especially true for busy professionals and parents. One of the biggest reasons for breaking a diet is convenience.

Meal prepping for weight loss doesn’t have to be bland and boring. It doesn’t have to be incredibly technical with counting macros and calculating every single calorie. If that is something you’re interested in, that method can be very effective. For the rest of us, we just want a simple meal routine that we can stick to that will help us trend in the right direction.

The Basics

• Set Goals: goals are important for staying focused. They don’t have to be ambitious but specificity helps. Too vague of a goal and you’ll find yourself unsure of progress and making excuses.
• Stick to a Shopping List: We are all tempted by the cookies and chips in the grocery store. Resist the urge to buy them and you’ll be less likely to falter from your diet later.
• Cook in Batches: Have healthy food ready by cooking in batches so you don’t have to cook every single day for every single meal.
• Eat What You Cook: don’t prepare 4 meals and then throw out 4 meals because you don’t want it. Get used to the mind set of, if you’re hungry, you eat what you cooked first before considering any other options.

More Advanced Meal Prepping Weight Loss Tips

• Portion Control: We’ve all heard of portion control but knowing it and understanding it is two different things. We’ve all gotten use to portions that are really unbalanced. It takes effort to unlearn that bad habit. These numbers are a general guide but it definitely shows how different fast food is to a balanced meal.
  • 25% protein
    • 50% vegetables
  • 25% carbs
    • Small amounts of high fat food

• Additional tips for portion control
  • Use measuring cups and spoons (or even a scale): This really help you stick to actual portion sizes.
  • Put food on a serving dish. Don’t eat from chip bags or any other large food container. It’s difficult to resist another bite when you have so much in front of you.
  • Use smaller dishes. Smaller dishes will make it feel like more food when you’re eating.

• Prepare Snacks: Everyone needs a snack now and then. It’s inevitable and actually for some diets, snacks can be the most important part. Diets that follow more frequent but smaller meals are essentially a lot of healthy snacks. Either way though, having quick bites of healthy food ready to go at any time will help you stay on diet and avoid the feeling that you’ve given up anything at all. It’s the simple conveniences that we tend to feel the most when they’re gone.
• Track Progress: We recommended setting goals earlier, well keep track of them as well. Even if it’s as simple as adding on 2 more healthy meals a week for 6 weeks. It feels good to achieve goals and making them measurable and attainable will make it more likely that you’ll stick to meal prepping for weight loss.
• Watch Condiments & Sauces: Condiments and sauces, especially salad dressings, can be much more unhealthy than you think. In fact, you should pay attention to the amount of salad dressing that is recommended per serving. Just because you’re eating a salad doesn’t mean it’ll help with weight loss if you’re piling on dressing, cheese, and croutons.
• Enjoy Healthy Eating: Possibly the most difficult part of all diets, actually enjoying the food that you make. If you’re not a skilled cook this is even tougher, however everyone struggles with enjoying their diets all of the time. We are made to believe that we have to suffer to be healthy. Healthy food can be good and sometimes it’s a matter of finding what healthy foods you personally enjoy and building a recipe plan around those.

Meal Prepping for Weight Loss Recipes