Meal Prep The Lazy Way
Shopping around the supermarket for ingredients, cutting the ingredients in the kitchen and cooking them into meals. When you hear the words “meal prep”, these are probably some of the things that come to mind.
Unfortunately, this takes up a lot of time that many of us cannot afford, which often gives a false impression that preparing meals for yourselves to eat healthier to be difficult. Fortunately, there are easier ways to help you prepare your meals. Here are four ways to help you get your meals prepared faster!
1. Prepare your ingredients in bulk
Preparing your ingredients can be as simple as cutting vegetables or marinating meat in bulk. This allows you to have more ingredients available to cook when you need them. You can also reserve an hour or two to cook multiple meals for the following days to consume. Either way, this reduces the amount of time you need to prepare your meals.
Example: Cook enough chicken for a week worth of lunch, pack them into 7 separate lunch boxes and store them in the freezer. Bring it down to the chiller to defrost 1 day before consumption. Just heat it up with a microwave and you are ready to eat!
2. Purchase frozen or pre-cut ingredients
If chopping, cutting or marinating meat is not something you want to do, pre-cut ingredients which are widely available for purchase in many supermarkets might be something to consider. From frozen vegetables to marinated beef bulgogi, there is no lack in variety. In fact, you can even purchase the ingredients online, and have them delivered directly to your home! Since you are going to buy in bulk, you might just get your delivery FREE as well if you meet the minimum purchase.
Online Supermarket Shopping: Honestbee, Redmart, FairPrice On
3. Use just 1 pot, pan, or tray to cook everything
Recipe & Picture Credits To Diethood.Com
Who likes washing dishes here? Not me. One of my favourite methods to minimize washing when meal prepping is to bake EVERYTHING. Lay out a clean aluminium foil on a huge baking tray, dump all my proteins and vegetables on it, bake it, separate them evenly into my lunch boxes, throw the aluminium foil, rinse the baking tray, DONE. I even do my preparation (eg. chopping & seasoning) of the ingredient on the baking tray itself. Lazy people are smart people because we always find a way to make things easier and still achieve the same results, am I right? Ok enough of self-praising, I’ve added in an Oven-Baked Salmon and Asparagus recipe here for you so that you can be as lazy as me. Thank me later.
4. Consider using Ready-to-Eat meals as part of your preparation
Perhaps cooking all your meals is not what you would like to do. After all, you may not have enough space in the refrigerator to keep that many boxes of food. Thankfully, preparing healthy meals is no longer limited to the kitchen.
Frozen Food or Meal Delivery services might be your next best option, and you can purchase them in bulk. Ready-to-eat healthy meals are now available in both online and major supermarkets with a wide variety of flavours at an affordable cost, making healthy eating accessible and convenient. Adding this option into your meal planning process can help to reduce time spent on your food while still getting the nutrients that you need!
Examples of meal prep to your door services: Fresher, Grain, YOLO
Hope this will help change your mindset on meal prepping and give these tips a go! Sometimes if you want convenience, you got to fork out a little bit of ka-ching ($$), but if it helps improve your lifestyle and increase your energy by just eating better through those meal prep services I would say it would be all worth it. Just like how we spend more $$ on supplements and “stuff” to improve our health.
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This article is written by our founder & head trainer, Gina Chan, who holds multiple certifications in exercise and nutrition.
Edited by the SgFitFam Team.