#40: Meal Prepping 101 (Benefits & how to get started)
[00:00:00] Welcome to 40 plus fitness for women. I'm Lynn, your host. And today we are going to talk about meal prep and what that means. You hear about meal prep all over social media. You see people doing fancy meal prep things, and I kind of wanted to break it down to what it is, what are the benefits. How do you do it?
And if you don't want to get like a hundred percent into it, what are small things you can do to start meal prepping so that you can be eating healthier and, for example, hitting your protein goals? But before we get into it, I wanted to say huge, huge, huge thank you to all of you who have been Rating and reviewing the podcast and hitting that subscribe button because it is really growing people are hearing it more and more places.
It's showing up in their searches and [00:01:00] it is wonderful and plus. I love, love, love reading your comments. They make me feel so good because I put a lot of hours into making these podcasts. And it's great to hear that people are getting something out of it. I mean, messages like. That people have been putting into practice the things that I've been teaching and are noticing that they're getting results actually a lot faster than what I claim they can get results, which is always really nice.
So please, if you haven't rated and reviewed yet, I would love to hear from you. That is if you're enjoying the show. Great. Yeah, so I started this morning. It's a rainy, windy fall day here and I have a Halloween party coming up tonight. But what I realized I hadn't done in a long time is to take progress pictures.
So this morning I did my progress pictures and I have to say that even though I have actually put on A couple of pounds [00:02:00] lately, now that I've started eating again, after recovering from my breakup and all the stress around that, I am seeing so much more muscle. I mean, my butt is growing. And also I noticed that my arm muscles are also growing.
So just a good reminder that your body needs fuel to actually build this muscle. Plus stress is awful for you. In all kinds of other ways, it,, causes sleep disturbances and Oh, a whole cascade of things. I'm going to do a whole episode on sleep because it really is the key pillar to health and feeling better when you are in midlife in particular, I think all over life, but midlife, it becomes really challenging for women because of the perimenopause transition and hormonal changes that we're going through.
But, anyway, for those who have been asking, the dating scene has been A total rollercoaster. Yeah, [00:03:00] last October, I met this guy who, oh my god, I mean, we had the same kind of vision of how we want to spend our time, and it just felt like, I can't remember feeling that good being around somebody, and I was really getting, looking forward to getting to know him better, and, yeah, then life happened.
That was that and rollercoaster went down again, but back to focusing on work and working out and my friends and other things. Those are good too.
So what is meal prep? In all its simplicity, meal prep means that you are planning and at least partially preparing your meals in advance. So if you are the kind of person who, let's say you're working at home and you think, Oh, Oh, hungry. And you go running down to the kitchen and you kind of look in the fridge and like, Oh, what am I going to eat now?
You are the opposite of a meal [00:04:00] prepper, right? You are not a meal prepper.
Okay, so what are the benefits of meal prepping? Well, first of all. So much less stress around food because you know what you're going to eat and it's at least partially ready for you.
You can hit your protein goals because you've already planned it out. You're going to save a heck of a lot of time. Of course, the prepping does take some time, but usually it's that. Weekday, you know, when you're in the thick of everyday life, you've got to go to work. You're going to go to the gym. You got to take care of your family, friends, whatever your days are packed.
You're really going to save time on meals when you've done the prepping in advance. So benefit number four is that it supports weight management. So if you're interested in maintaining your current weight or even losing weight, then meal [00:05:00] prepping is really an excellent, excellent tool for that.
Because how many of us, if you go to the refrigerator and just take something when you're hungry, you're going to take whatever's quick and easy. And often the quick and easy is not the thing that is going to give you the protein that you need and stay within your calorie limits. So it really, really reduces the temptation to just eat something easy.
Like I have snack bars in the house and you know, when you're hungry and you don't have anything prepped, grabbing those, but they're really not, you know, for the calories, the nutritional amount is really not great. So having something prepared, it's going to be much, much better overall. It improves the choices that you make because you're thinking about this in advance, you're making the plan, and then you're eating the healthy stuff when you're having your meals.
Now,[00:06:00] how to meal prep. So the first thing that you need to decide is what are your goals for the meal prepping? Now, it may be that Your goal is to just get in enough protein every day. So for me right now, that is the reason why I'm meal prepping, because I need to make sure there is enough protein on the hand for me to get in the 140 to 145 grams that I want to get in in a day.
Now, if you're in a calorie deficit phase, then meal prepping is enormously beneficial because you can already in advance decide what you're going to eat so you can stay within your calorie allotment. So, for me right now, I use it kind of for both because I have the protein goal and then I'm keeping myself at maintenance, and I've noticed that about the 2, 000 calories a day keeps me at the weight that I'm at right now, where I don't gain weight or lose weight.
Okay, [00:07:00] step two is then to actually plan your meals.
Make the grocery list for buying them. So, and this means that you need to make decisions like how many meals a day are you going to eat? So I have talked about how I break down my day when I've discussed in previous episodes about how do I get in the protein that I get in. So I. Make sure that I'm getting five meals a day.
And by the way, your meals do not have to be exciting, right? I know online they make really sexy, cool meals and yes, you can do that. And if you Google like meal prepping recipes and all that, I'm sure you can find. Tons of them, so, you know, go for it if that's your thing, but for me, I stick to something pretty basic.
So for me, for example, I eat five times a day, so I have breakfast, lunch, snack, [00:08:00] protein shake and dinner five times., I mean, it's really not that complicated, but my plan for breakfast is to always have two eggs. And I make them in various different ways. So on my grocery list, I need to make sure I have eggs.
I have a slice of bread. I have some Greek yogurt or some Skyr so I make sure those are on my list and I have coffee with skim milk. So that was my meal plan for breakfast. So I make sure that I have those ingredients on my grocery list so that they're in my house later, then. My snack, as you probably know already, I'm really, really boring with my meals, but it is cottage cheese with little cherry tomatoes, or actually they're plum tomatoes because they're kind of oval, but they're delicious.
And then the other very simple one that I have is that I plan to have a whey protein shake every day. So I make sure that I've bought my whey protein, you know, powder, [00:09:00] so that's ready to go. So there, I've already planned, done a meal plan for three of my five meals each day. And that was not very complicated, was it?
So it really doesn't have to be super hard.
So lunch and dinner are actually for me, the more challenging ones, because in both of those, I eat like a real meal. I'm not a sandwich for lunch person. And my real meal will always focus around a protein source. I want to get in my 25 grams of protein, each of those meals, which means that whatever my protein source happens to be, I need to get about 125 grams of that protein source.
So That's a bit of chicken or ground beef or ground chicken or whatever. And then actually I can plan to have with it, whatever I want. I could have sweet potato. I could have a baked potato. I could have, [00:10:00] broccoli, chopped carrot sticks and tomatoes and you know, whatever. Happens to look good in the grocery store, but I want to make sure that I have enough of those protein sources in order to cover eating twice a day every day, right?
Okay, so once you've got your plan and you've built your grocery list, then obviously the next thing is to pop off to the grocery store. Or nowadays, I guess you could order your groceries online to be delivered. And if you're living in the US, especially if you're living in a big city, I don't know about how it is in small towns, but in the big cities, I mean, Oh my goodness, it's wonderful to go into the stores like Costco or whatever, because they have already these protein sources.
They have the vegetables already chopped up berries and all kinds of things. So I have to say when I was there this past summer, I was really, really jealous at how much easier [00:11:00] it would be to eat healthy there. When you're eating at home, because the other thing that I did notice that I, that while I was there is that if I was on the road and I needed to pick something up, even the smallest little sandwich or wrap, you know, you look at something and you're like, Oh, chicken wrap, that should be pretty healthy.
Oh my God, I don't know what they put in them, but the calorie amount for this tiny, tiny wrap thing was ridiculous. So yeah, I wish I had had my own kitchen so I could have prepped my own foods to bring all over the place with me.
Then obviously step four is to cook or prep the food. So for example, if you're doing, like I do where I have the various protein sources and then I have some vegetable or something with it, then, you know, you can cook some of it in advance. I [00:12:00] happen to have enough flexibility in my job that I can take the time to.
Like let's say Mondays, I'll cook spaghetti, sauce and spaghetti, and then I'll eat that for lunch on Monday, and then I'll put it in the fridge and it'll be ready for me to eat again later in the week. And that already covers about four to six meals for me, depending on how big a package of ground beef I buy.
Or if I'm doing chicken with veggies, I could cut the chicken into strips, cook it before or after I cut them into strips. So that's ready to go in the fridge. And then if I don't want to heat up cooked vegetables, you could already cut them, you know, if you've got broccoli, you cut them into little pieces, put them in boxes, stick those in the fridge.
And then every day you just fry up, you know, you stir fry, whatever it is, the vegetables that you want to eat that day. [00:13:00] So It really does not have to be super complicated now where it might get a tiny bit more complicated or some things to note. This isn't so much more complicated, but if you're actually tracking your calories, so how do you do that with this meal prep?
So if you're using a recipe that you found online, a lot of times they've already measured the calories. For you. So if you just follow the recipe exactly as it is, you know that when I've created this whole batch of whatever that meal is, then I will have this many calories in that batch. And then if that batch is going to be eaten over four different meals, then you just divide that calorie amount by four.
And by the way. Obviously, if you make a stir fry or, or like a stew or something like that, where there are many little ingredients, you're not necessarily going to get exactly the [00:14:00] same number of calories into all four of those containers, right? But that doesn't actually matter because what matters is how many calories you're eating Overall, I always measured the calories in a particular week, , and one day you might have a little bit more, one day have a little bit less.
If you eat all four of those boxes of prepped food over the course of the week, then you will have consumed the calories of that whole recipe. Now, if you don't have a recipe where the calories are already counted for you, then what you need to do is you need to count the calories, right? So as you are cooking the food, so let's say it's a stir fry that you're making.
So you take your, whatever it is, broccoli and. Before you throw it in, you weigh it and you write down every ingredient that you have put into that recipe or every little bit of oil that you put in to [00:15:00] grease the pan or, or cream or veggies or whatever you put in there, you write it all down and then you enter that into one of these calorie trackers as a recipe.
And then you'll be able to count could also do this manually on paper right with a calculator or in your head if you're very good at math. , you calculate how much that whole batch of whatever it is that you cooked has calories and then you divide it into servings into different serving containers.
And this gets a little bit trickier if you have children because, you know, they're gonna maybe take something and it might not be, you know, quite one serving or whatever. So yeah, maybe you need to be a little bit Well, you could do so that you already split it into the servings and then you give your kids their servings or that you make your food and then there's the children's [00:16:00] food.
My kids, for example, they don't really like my spaghetti sauce, so they generally leave it alone, but that's so homogeneous that it doesn't really matter if they take some spaghetti sauce because it's not like they will have taken out just the meat of the spaghetti sauce because it's ground beef sauce.
And by the way, if you're not tracking the whole amount of calories in whatever meal it is that you have prepped, and let's say make a chicken stew that's got chicken chunks in it and, and whatever the stew, and maybe you've got some rice with it or something, then just make sure that when you are scooping out the food, you measure How much protein you're getting.
So how heavy the chicken pieces are that you're scooping out. So you're getting enough of your protein because I'm always advocating the one gram per pound body weight, , as your daily protein target. , so that's kind of the basics of meal prep.[00:17:00] But if that all sounds really overwhelming and I can completely get it that that can sound like, Oh my God, I can't sit down with recipe books and calculating and a scale and all that kind of thing, then, you know, baby steps.
Right. If you're somebody who has planned, none of your meals really, and it was always kind of ad hoc eating and you want to, for example, increase the amount of protein in your diet, you're probably not going to be able to go from getting like 10 grams a day or 15 grams, which is what a lot of people are getting, unfortunately, up to over a hundred grams a day.
But here's some super easy meal prep things that you could do. So decide, for example, that you are going to eat two eggs for breakfast every morning. And that's fairly straightforward. And if you don't have time to be like frying eggs or scrambling eggs or whatever, what you can do is [00:18:00] boil them, hard boil them, cool them and put them in the fridge.
Hard boiled eggs are good for about seven days in the fridge. I do this every week and they're actually a great snack also for the kids, who then, you know, peel them and put them on a sandwich when they're hungry and they're getting protein. Another easy thing to do is to make sure that you always have Greek yogurt and skur.
Whichever you prefer or both, if you like both on hand and maybe even some single serving sizes. So if you're rushing off to the gym and you're hungry or rushing off to work or whatever, rushing off in general, you can just grab the single serving size and a spoon and like eat it while you're on your commute there or in a red light or whatever.
So that's already like planning in advance a snack, right? Healthy snack. And then another one, which is [00:19:00] super easy to implement is to have the protein powder. Just decide that every day I am going to have a protein shake and keep the protein powder on hand and have the shake. Now if you are working out during the day, I definitely recommend that you have that shake right after your workout because it helps.
to put your body back out of the breaking down muscle kind of, , stress response state that it's in into a building muscle state that it's in. So for us, Perry and Benoposal and post menopausal women. It is really recommended that we have a big dose of protein within half an hour of finishing our workout.
So I always have one, , the powder with me in a bottle. When I go to the gym and as soon as I'm done with my workout, I put water in it, shake it up and start drinking it. And, I actually do a double dose. So I get 45 grams of [00:20:00] protein in. Then, and it is a good idea to get really like a powerful shot of protein after your workout.
Okay, so that's what I have today around meal prep. So let's quickly summarize. So the benefits are that you're going to have a lot less stress about food. You'll be able to hit kind of your nutrition targets a lot more easily, for example, getting in enough protein. And if you're paying attention to how many calories you eat, this is definitely an excellent, excellent tool for you because when you're doing ad hoc eating, so getting hungry, going down and checking out what's in the fridge, the temptation is very frequently to eat something that is not very.
healthy, so it will improve the choices that you make and support weight loss and also weight management. I mean, I know there may be some of you out there who do need to gain weight and this can also help with that, [00:21:00] right? And the steps. To doing meal prep are figuring out what your goals are.
So is it the protein? Is it the weight loss, the weight gain, the weight maintenance? Is it more fiber? What is it that you want to get out of the meal prep? And then step two is to plan your meals accordingly and create the grocery list that comes with that. The meals that you have planned then, of course, step three is going to the grocery store and Step four is cooking or prepping the meals So you can either do so that you cook a whole batch of food and then you refrigerate or even freeze Why not that food or you can do some prep kind of things which might be like chopping vegetables So that you can stir fry them more easily in the future and then I gave some quick tips, which were to keep [00:22:00] some hard boiled eggs in your fridge because they are a great snack and I would even say have a couple a day for your breakfast.
, Keeping skewer or Greek yogurt, even single serving size. So when you're on the run, you have something healthy you can grab from the fridge. And then number three was the protein powder. So start incorporating a protein shake into your day every day. All right. So that was it for today. And I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, then go ahead and reach out to me in my DMs. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, then obviously in the comment section. And by the way, if you guys didn't know, I do publish this as a video on YouTube.
So if you prefer to watch rather than just listen, then you can find me there. And with that, I will leave you and wish you happy training.[00:23:00]