![]() To reduce food waste, make frozen and tinned foods your best friend. If you've seen the 'ripe avocado' memes, you know how temperamental veg can be. That said, don’t leave your food at room temperature for more than two hours. ![]() You’ll avoid the condensation that makes food go soggy. To keep your meals as fresh as possible, let them cool down completely before you refrigerate them, says Long. Easy Hacks to Take the Hassle out of Meal Prep for Muscle Gain Once you have your meals mapped out, make a list of all the ingredients you need – along with quantities – and hit the shops. Cooking and pre-portioning chilli or curry, for example, is far more practical than juggling multiple recipes. To keep things interesting, try having a culinary theme for each week, Long suggests, such as ‘Mexican’ and ‘Indian’. Keep carbs complex where possible, and don’t forget healthy fats – olive oil, avocado and nuts will keep you fuller for longer.īatch cooking is the name of the game. Protein-wise, stick to lean options like chicken, fish, turkey, lean beef, eggs, tofu, and greek yoghurt. In its most stripped-back form, the foundation of a muscle-building meal contains approximately “two handfuls of vegetables, one fist-size portion of carbs, and a palm-size portion of protein,” Jo Travers, registered dietitian and author of The Low Fad Diet. The first step is to map out recipes for the meals you’re prepping i.e. “I don’t just preach the importance of meal prep,” he adds, “I practice it, because it enabled me to obtain the results that I so desperately wanted.” Sounds like all that chopping might be worth it. “Knowing what you’re going to eat on a daily basis will make the difference in both your health and your wallet.” Plus, it gets results. “Preparing our meals in advance gives us a better estimate of monthly food costs while reducing miscellaneous food purchases,” says Curry. And if you’re the macro-counting kind and have a specific training goal in your sights, you can map out a week’s worth of meals down to the very last gram. Not only will your scales be lighter without those high street sandwich lunches your wallet will be thankful too. The only thing you’ll have to wash up is the plastic containers. By giving an hour or two of your weekend to meal prep, you’ll free up your weekday evenings. And if your plans change, the food goes to waste.īut as they say – if it was easy, everyone would do it. Your weekly shopping list requires meticulous planning, because one missed ingredient could throw off a week’s worth of meals. ![]() You’re forced to dedicate a chunk of your Sunday afternoon to cooking. If you don’t like your lunch, you’re stuck with it for another day or two. Here, you’ll find everything you need to meal prep like a pro, freeing up brain space for other, more pressing decisions: chest day or leg day? The Pros and Cons of Meal Prep “Having healthy meals and snacks ‘at arm’s length’ enables us to continue our hectic and busy lifestyles but with more nutritious food so we can accomplish our fitness and wellness goals at the same time.” “We eat mindlessly, paying little attention to the caloric and nutritional value of the food, and we skip meals, which leads to overeating at the next meal in order to satisfy our intense hunger. ![]() "When our schedules are packed, meal times can go to the wayside,” says Kevin Curry, founder of food blog Fit Men Cook. By pre-batching breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks ahead of time, you deal with a decision-making double-whammy: not just what to eat and when, but also how much. This is why meal prep is your greatest muscle-building, fat-torching ally. You need willpower to stop yourself from grazing – but in order to fuel willpower, you need to eat. As your mental energy drains with each fleeting decision, your body looks for a quick way to replenish its dwindling stocks: sugar. Your brain is the most energy-demanding organ in your body, and it uses glucose as its primary fuel source. Willpower isn’t something you either have or you don’t – it’s a form of mental energy that gets depleted every time you make a decision, a series of experiments conducted by Florida State University found. You make around 35,000 decisions every day on average – hit snooze or get up? Toast or porridge? White shirt or blue? – and the more you make, the more taxing each one becomes until eventually, your exhausted brain looks for shortcuts and it starts acting impulsively. It’s a psychological phenomenon called ‘decision fatigue’. The good news is, you might not be entirely to blame – turns out, your empty stomach isn’t the only thing compelling you to grab a slice of pizza from the work canteen. You eat out because you don’t have time to cook a healthy meal. The problem is, knowing doesn’t always equate to ‘doing’.
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