Meal Prep. Those are two words that I would guess you hear and see a lot of these days. What do they mean to you? Does it mean you have a weeks worth of lunches and/or snacks planned out and ready to go? Does it mean that you know exactly what you are having for dinner each night this week? I came across the below picture the other day, it’s a meme I’ve seen several times. It’s cute, it has a Pug after all; and pizza and donuts. For some reason when I saw it this time it made me start thinking about it’s meaning. The caption reads, “When you realize you don’t know how to properly meal prep.” The pug looks sad as he looks down on his prepped containers of pizza and donuts. Sad I assume because his meal prep is done but isn’t healthy.
So that made me ponder what I think those words mean and what others think about when they hear them. For some, those words have been around for a long time. For others, it’s a new “thing”, one of those trends us females always think we need to get on board with. So I’m sure that we all have various definitions and meanings for them. Often you’d also hear them interchanged with the words food prep and meal planning. All one in the same I believe.
When I really think about it I have meal prepped for years. Many fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to planning dinner, they grab what’s available at their house or they grab takeout. This is something that has just always seemed so odd to me. I generally have an idea what we will be having based on what other events we may have going on that week. For example when my kids were younger if we had a ball game or practice, then that nights dinner likely would something we could throw together easily once we got home or it was something already cooking in the crock pot. Today, with only one adult child still in the home dinner usually is planned more around how many people are going to be there that night to eat it.
To me, this is just the norm, and have I’ve always planned things out. Each week, or bi-weekly depending on how our pay schedules were running, I check out the cabinets and make a grocery list. I start with the things that I know I need, you know the basics, milk, bread, toilet paper, all that fun stuff. Then I start looking in the freezer and the pantry to see what I need to compliment what I already have to make meals, and that gets put on the list. Next up, it’s the new stuff, ingredients from a recipe, or whatever else I think of I’d like to have for dinner soon. A new thing I’ve recently added to this is that I will make a list to stick on the fridge of what meals we have ready and available to us. Again, I don’t specify when we are having them, but it saves us time when we are deciding what we might like for dinner….we just pick from a list, our own home menu so to speak.
Next up and more related to this picture is the lunch planning. For many years when I packed our daily lunches it was just basics like whatever we had leftover from dinner, or a sandwich and chips, nothing fancy. In more recent years I have gotten more into that trend of “planning” our lunches out. Here is where my pondering of this picture comes in, when you hear the words food prep or meal prep I am going to bet that your mind automatically goes to healthy food. Isn’t that why the dog in this picture looks so sad and seems disappointed in himself? Because he prepped his food in advance, but what he prepped is pizza and donuts, not exactly on the healthy food list. How sad is that?
Don’t get me wrong here, healthy eating is great. When I do our lunch prep I usually try to make several salads for us to have. Often times I will also make fairly healthy dishes like Italian Chicken & Vegetables to have ready to go. That being said it makes me realize that I have fallen into that trap of the latest trend also. Which is odd, because I normally like to do different, not trendy. But I feel like what we should be focusing on here is the preparation of the food, and what it means for us. It means that instead of having to get up earlier to prepare lunch in the mornings, we can grab something that’s already made. It means that if we are running late and don’t have time to make something, we have an option other than ordering out. Which means we are saving money, and probably eating something a little better for us than fast food.
My whole point here is don’t feel like meal prep/food prep is just about being healthy. Don’t limit yourself to the perfect diet plan or latest food trend you see posted on facebook. Don’t avoid doing the prep because you don’t want the healthy food or don’t think you will like it. Instead look at the benefits of doing the prep that I described above, and prep what works for you. If it’s pizza and donuts then fine, let it be pizza and donuts. Here’s the thing, if you pack that lunch container, then you will be having ONE piece of pizza and ONE donut. If you don’t pack it you may end up ordering a pizza and eating more than one piece for sure, or you may stop at the convenience store and pick up that bag of donuts and you know you are gonna eat two, or three, or the whole bag!
So I don’t know what meal prep, food prep, meal planning means to you but I now know a little more about what they mean to me. I will continue to plan out our dinners, as well as make lunches and snacks ahead of time. It’s easier for me when we are heading out to work that we are able to grab our food and go. But I think in the future I won’t be as focused on making my lunch containers match those pinterest posts, instead I’ll just focus on the why behind it all.
PS: Here is the recipe I use for the Italian Chicken & Veggies if you are interested!
Arise and Glow 