We typically try to improve our lives through adding discipline. New habits. New routines. Better planning apps. Sometimes the improvement isn’t in adding something to our lives, but rather in removing things that aren’t really necessary. Food is a huge example of that.
Every day, we make a bunch of choices that we probably don’t pay attention to. What will I eat? What do I want for lunch? When should I cook? Should I even bother? Is now a good time to start cooking or not? What do I want? Should I just order out again?
They all look like small decisions, and I say probably because they do seem like small decisions, but all of these choices take some part of our time during the week and they chip away at our mental energy and our attention. Meal prep can help to alleviate some of the unnecessary time and energy spent making choices like these, and without having to uproot your entire lifestyle in the process.
At its most basic, meal prepping is planning and preparing for the meals you’ll need in the week or days ahead. But meal prep is much bigger than that; it’s a system for making your life a little bit more predictable.
Meal prep makes your day more predictable. If you have already prepared your food and know what’s for your upcoming meal, you don’t have to worry about that meal anymore; you can simply eat and move on. Your meal has been chosen and you don’t have to decide when, where or what you’re going to eat during a time when other, perhaps more important decisions are being made.
This predictability creates a calmer routine without adding effort or time.
Meal prep also helps you do something more efficiently. If you have to do something every day, it will probably feel very repetitive. Every morning you cook and prepare some ingredients, every afternoon you clean up all those pots and pans, and you do this all week long. While this is one way of doing it, it’s not always the most efficient use of your time.
Meal prep allows you to do these activities as one single block of time, instead of one small block of activities spread throughout the week. You’re not spending all this time every single day doing a repetitive set of activities over and over again; it’s just once or maybe twice a week and then you’re done. This is not only a more efficient use of your time, but it is less distracting as well.
Finally, meal prep helps alleviate some of the decision fatigue from making repetitive choices throughout your day. By reducing the choices and making them less repetitive, you free up some of your mind that’s been tied up all week by the question: What am I going to eat tonight?
By reducing the number of food related decisions, you free yourself of those repetitive distractions and your day becomes a little less scattered and you feel less like you have to rush at the end of every day. There’s a little more clarity to your daily schedule.
Meal prep can be a complicated thing if you let it be one, but like all good systems, it is simplest to follow. Meal prepping doesn’t necessarily mean you need to make all your meals for a week or all of your meals for the day. You may even want to prep some things throughout the day, but as long as you keep your schedule for preparing food to a minimum and you keep the preparation itself simple, meal prepping becomes very manageable.
Some people like to prep multiple meals at a time, whereas others like to do just one meal and just prep some meat and veggies for the rest of the week that they can mix and match as they please. The goal is simple: you want to reduce the time spent making meal choices during the week so that the process is easy to manage.
It’s hard to know where to start when trying something new, especially something as simple as meal prep. Most of us tend to overthink things before we start, and that usually leads us in the wrong direction and into an even bigger problem. What we need is a system that’s simple and easy to learn.
A few recipes. Familiar, healthy ingredients. Some time in the kitchen.
Once you get started, things can evolve. You start to get a feeling for the best ways of keeping the process simple and easy to repeat in the week ahead, but also the best ways of staying organized with everything throughout the week.
As you go, you may not see much of a big difference in your routine, but over time you will start to feel the effect. There will be fewer decisions to make. Less uncertainty about the week ahead. Less stress about being unprepared to meet some demands.
It all comes down to the stability of your schedule and the peace of mind that it brings to you. That stability is what can help to make the week feel more manageable and a little less chaotic overall.