If you are into fitness, you should know about meal prep. It is a time-saving and easy choice. You can use the ingredients you buy to make healthy meals, without wasting or spending too much money (much cheaper than takeout). But ordinary meal prep is to make the same meals for a week, which might make you feel bored.
So today I want to introduce you to an advanced version meal prep, which is convenient and diverse. Don’t worry about nitrite, as long as you cook and store properly, it’s fine. If you are really not sure, you can wash and cut the ingredients first, and then cook them on the same day. Both methods have pros and cons. You can see which one sumeal prepits you better.
Fitness lovers should know this. Sometimes we order takeout, mainly because we are lazy. We are tired from work, and we have to cook every day. We feel unhappy, and we just want to eat some takeout or bread or something. But the advantage of meal prep is that you can eat healthy meals anytime. When you are hungry, just take them out of the fridge, and you can eat healthily.
Also, meal prep can help you save money, time, and energy. I am the same as you, I don’t know what to eat for lunch every day… But the downside of meal prep is that you eat the same thing every day! Although scientific research says that eating the same food every day helps control appetite, this kind of life is too boring.
The advanced version of meal prep
The advanced version of meal prep is that you can prepare the ingredients in advance on the weekend, and you don’t have to cook on weekdays. And you can mix and match different ingredients every day, to enjoy different flavors, without getting bored.
It’s like the popular salad bars nowadays, you can use various ingredients to create your own combinations. Unlike the ordinary meal prep, you don’t have to make every meal on the weekend. You just have to prepare the basic ingredients, and then you can choose what you want to eat on weekdays, to have different lunches.
The suggestion is, to choose 1-2 kinds of staple food, 2-3 kinds of protein, and 5-7 kinds of vegetables every week. You can choose according to your own needs, more ingredients mean more hassle to prepare, but also more options to eat. On the contrary, fewer ingredients mean easier to prepare, but also more monotonous to eat.
How to choose ingredients for meal prep?
1 kind of staple food
brown rice If you don’t like brown rice, you can mix it with white rice.Brown rice is easy to buy and not expensive, and it goes well with many dishes.I like to eat warm salad with brown rice, which is to use brown rice as the base, add various vegetables and protein, and drizzle with sauce, and mix well.
2 kinds of protein
chicken breast and tofu Chicken breast is a good animal protein, and tofu is a good plant protein. No matter where you live, you should be able to buy them easily. These two ingredients can be cooked quickly, just add some salt and black pepper and they are delicious. You can also use seafood, eggs, etc. If you have time, you can also choose beef. If you want to save trouble, you can also buy canned tuna or ready-made chicken breast or braised beef.
5 kinds of vegetables
green beans, broccoli, red bell pepper, kohlrabi, cucumber .
My matching principle is, 1 kind of bean or mushroom ingredient, 2 kinds of cooked vegetables, 2 kinds of raw vegetables.
Beans and mushrooms can make your nutrition and fiber richer.
You can choose vegetables according to your own preferences, but it is best to choose different colors of vegetables, not all green, so that the nutrition is more comprehensive, the meals are more beautiful, and you eat more happily.
Also, raw vegetables like cherry tomatoes, lettuce, radish, cucumber are very convenient. If you have an oven, you can put all the vegetables and protein in it and bake them, which is simpler.
2kinds of sauce
Because I want to make warm salad with rice, I prepared two kinds of sauce.
One is soy sauce salad dressing, which is very suitable for Asian taste, and similar to the sauce for raw fish slices, and also easy to preserve. The other is chili yogurt sauce, which is very low in calories, and suitable for people who love spicy food.
Although it sounds strange to combine yogurt and chili sauce.
but actually yogurt with chili sauce is like mayonnaise, which can enhance the aroma and taste of the meals.
You can also skip the sauce, as long as you add some seasonings when you cook the protein.
such as making teriyaki tofu or spicy chicken breast.
There is no fixed method for meal prep, as long as it suits you!
You can use your favorite method to cook the ingredients for meal prep.
I hope this article can give you some inspiration.