Meal Prep Guide

Meal prep is one of the single most ways to successfully set up your week for nutrition.

Most of the time, we make bad food choices due to convenience. Unfortunately when we are hungry, grabbing the easiest meal from the closest fast food or convenience store isn’t always the healthiest choice. Making decisions on the fly can also take up a lot of brain space trying to choose your lunch or fighting cravings as they arise rather than being prepared!

We want to be eating 80% of our meals each week as wholesome, nourishing foods, and only 20% as lower quality “treat” foods per week.

This is where Meal Prep comes into play, it stops you from being so reactive trying to find food each day and instead already have your food ready to go.

The definition of “Meal Prep” is very varied it can be anything from packing your lunch for work that day to preparing all your meals for the week. The main objective is to have enough food ready and not be left raiding vending machines at the end of the week!

Step One: Know Your Week’s Target Calorie Intake

In the Powherful program, you should know your target calories for your goal, so that you are eating the right amount for the result that you want. This is what will determine the serving sizes of your meals or the quantities of your snacks. If not head to https://healthyeater.com/flexible-dieting-calculator to find out your recommended calories.

If you are prepping for a partner or family, obviously you will need to factor their food in too!

Step Two: Plan Your Week and Meals You Want to Cook

Next look over your week ahead and decide what meals you would like to eat. I use a week’s view table that I write in my planned meals.

And you must also decide what method you want to use to prep your food:

• One big cook-up and freeze the rest

• Two smaller meal preps, one at the start of the week and one halfway through (usually Sunday and Wednesday for my house!).

• Buy the ingredients for the week and cook nightly, with leftovers for lunch

• Other

If you are just starting, start simple with only one or two meals to begin.

The simplest way to meal prep is to choose balanced meals using measurements of each macronutrient at your meal with protein, carbohydrate and fat source and some veggies.

For recommended amounts head to the Meal Plans for different calorie ranges from the button below.

The other option is to make some bulk recipes with everything included.

Step Three: Make Your List and Go Shopping

From your recipes, look at what you already have and then write your list on what you need. If possible, try to get foods that have a cross-over of ingredients to not waste food or leave packets sitting in the cupboard going off. Also healthy food doesn’t need to be extremely expensive. Most simple foods are cheap and you can buy from grocers and supermarkets, you don’t need exotic superfoods. Buying food that is in season will be cheaper and better quality.

Step Four: Cooking

Schedule the time when you will cook your meals. To save time you can double up recipes, such as cooking one meal in the oven while another is on the stove. Or cooking up lots of proteins on the barbecue. Or pop your recipe into the slow cooker.

Step Five: Portioning and Storing your meals

After cooking, you can use a kitchen scale to portion your meals into containers. If all the food is cooked and still enjoyable after being frozen, it’s a good idea to portion them in their containers and either refrigerate or freeze.

Or you can keep the food in one big container to be distributed through the week.

For freshness, keep cooked meats and veg away from fresh until ready to eat (e.g fresh salad and meat)

Step Six: How to track your meals

If you have balanced meals as your prepped recipes, then you will just have to track the cooked weight of the food. e.g 100g cooked chicken breast, 100g white rice cooked and 30g avocado. Usually I don’t track vegetables but you can if you are in a fat loss phase and wanting to be very correct.

If your recipe makes 4 servings, then you know that if you have divided it into 4 portions then the nutritional information will be valid. Try to use recipes that already have nutritional information avaliable

Step Seven: Eat your meals.

The last step is to actually eat your meals! Make sure the foods you have chosen are delicious, satisfying and last well in the fridge or freezer. Reflect on your meal prep each week to improve on your recipes or to collect your favourites so that you enjoy the food that you eat to reach your goals.

Happy prepping!