Meal Prep

Life often gets hectic and making healthy decisions gets thrown out the window. The biggest problem I hear is time. It takes less time to go out to eat than it does to go to the grocery store and cook something usually, but your waistline will stay thinner and your wallet fatter if you cook meals at home.  When you make time to cook, make extra. You can freeze the extra and eat it later if you don’t want to eat the same thing a couple days in a row. If you make enough meals at once, you can rotate them throughout the week. The key is have a plan each week and stick to it. Look at your schedule and plan accordingly, say if you’re in sales and are in your car all day, you probably don’t want lunches that require heating up.

Here are just a few examples of healthy meals you can make it bulk. If I can make them, you can make them. I am self taught.

Turkey Taco Salad

1. Chop up 2 hearts of Romaine lettuce, rinse, and spin in a salad spinner.
2. Brown 2 lbs of ground turkey breast and use low sodium taco seasoning according to directions on the packet.
3. Open a can of low sodium black beans, rinse them in a colander.
4. Cut cherry tomatoes in half (only when you’re going to eat them soon).
5. On a bed of lettuce, place your taco meat, beans, 2% Mexican blend shredded cheese, guacamole, and salsa.
6. Eat it.
7. Store the rest in the fridge and save for later. This isn’t half bad with cold meat either if you don’t have access to a microwave at work for lunch.

Salmon Fillet with Green Beans and Sweet Potato Chunks

1. Set the oven for 425.
2. In a glass baking dish with a little olive oil coating the bottom, place your salmon fillets.
3. Sprinkle the fillets with lemon pepper seasoning to taste, and cook until the internal temperature reaches 145 degrees F. (10-15 minutes)
4. Place your green beans in the steaming tray of a rice cooker. Steam them according to directions for your rice cooker. Steam until they are al dente.
5. Peel and chop a medium sweet potato. Place in a microwave safe dish. Add a dash of water and sprinkle cinnamon on the chunks. Microwave on the vegetable setting, or 4 minutes or so if your microwave isn’t fancy.

Ginger Chicken Stir-Fry w/ Asparagus (my wife pinned this on Pinterest and I made it)

Link:I’ll never admit I used Pinterest

Snacks Examples:

1. Trail mix (small handful, this is very dense in calories)
2. Beef jerky or turkey jerky
3. 1-2 pieces of low-fat string cheese, 1-2 hard-boiled eggs, 1-2 handfuls of grapes, and 1-2 thumb-sized portions of walnuts. (1 for women, 2 for men, that day I was really hungry so I had 3 eggs…)

*Note, not all of this together is a snack, I hope that is obvious.