We’ve all heard the expression “fail to prepare or prepare to fail” applied to the context of nutrition when it comes to health and fitness goals.
Although a lack of preparation does not lead to imminent failure, winging your nutrition is likely to slow your progress quite significantly for a number of reasons.
Firstly, making food choices as you go along the day can lead you to eat quite low food volume, which is not particularly helpful for satiety when dieting. If you’re new to nutrition and to monitoring your dietary intake, this could also mean accidentally over-consuming one macronutrient and under-consuming another one (usually protein, which is important for muscle building, repair, and satiety)!
Secondly, if you aren’t prepared, it is likely that you’ll end up paralysed when it comes to making food-related decisions. This sense of overwhelm can often leave you feeling stuck, and going back to “default” choices that you may have been wanting to move away from; and unfortunately, this can often perpetuate the cycle of “I can’t do this, I am a failure”.
And thirdly, not having a vague nutrition plan can mean that a lot more food goes to waste: you might end up buying foods in the supermarket that you don’t know how to incorporate into a meal, which is incredibly expensive over-time, not to mention terrible for the environment.
So, of course, meal prepping – or at least, menu prepping – is far more useful and optimal to achieve goals. I know it can seem complicated and like a bit of a pain, but there really isn’t any need to complicate things. Therefore, here are my top tips for keeping meal prep simple, easy and efficient, so you can achieve your goals faster.
(1) Plan at least 2-3 meals for your day, and work everything else around it
For example, you may choose to input your breakfast, lunch and dinner meals into your nutrition tracker (e.g., myfitnesspal). Or you can input your pre-workout, post-workout and post-post workout meals into it (whichever denomination you prefer). Once you’ve established the total calorie and macro intake for those meals, you can implement some flexibility with your other meals and snacks around it.
(2) Start your meal planning by prioritising a protein source for each meal
When people wing their nutrition, they’re most likely to over-consume carbohydrates and fats, but under-consume protein. This isn’t inherently problematic – however, if you’re going to the gym and doing a lot of resistance training, there is a large benefit to ensuring that you are consuming sufficient protein. Therefore, by prioritising your protein source for each meal, you can then add in carbs and fats accordingly, based on your current goals.
3) Frozen food and microwaveable food is ok!
Many people are under the impression that meal prep should require 5h in the kitchen on a Sunday night, putting together a culinary experience for their 30min lunch break at work. No. Make it easy for yourself! Using frozen food or microwaveable food is absolutely fine! You can cook your meats ahead of time, weigh them out into Tupperware, and then add in e.g., microwaveable carbs (potatoes, rice…), and add frozen veggies. With this system, it won’t take you more than 30min to whip together all your lunches for the week!
(4) If you’re short of time, use pre-weighed out food packs
Yes, it might not be ideal from a packaging-waste perspective, but if you find you’re short of time, do yourself a favour and use foods that have already been packaged and weighed out for you. For example, you can buy oat sachets which will save you time when weighing these out; you can buy small fruit packages, microwaveable rice packages, and pre-cooked meats too.
(5) Write your menu out and/or input it all into MyFitnessPal before the day
This strategy has been an absolute time-saver for me. Inputting all my meals for the week into MFP ahead of time means that even when I’m exhausted, I don’t have to waste energy making food decisions and I just go with what’s written in the app. This also gives me some wriggle-room, but for the most part, just saves me standing in the kitchen looking at the cupboard and wondering what I’ll eat. It therefore also increases my mindfulness around food, because I’m ensuring that I’m eating frequently enough that I don’t get starving and then find myself reaching for snacks that are not aligned with my value of health.
Even if you were to implement one of the tips above, you could see a significant improvement in your dietary adherence (if this is something important for you to work towards).
