Level-Up Your Lunches With These Top 5 Tips for Any Meal Prep Beginner

2.) Three Words: Safety and Storage

The refrigerator and freezer are life-savers, if you know how to use them correctly.

You need to pay close attention to which foods you refrigerate and which ones you should freeze, and for how long you can keep each dish before it spoils.

Keep track of the storage times. For your cooked meal, we recommend you follow this food safety chart. From salads to leftover pizza, follow this chart religiously. You can also print this chart and pin it to your refrigerator.

For information on freezing uncooked food, we recommend the Huffingpost’s Frozen Food chart.

Other than that, here are our tried and tested tips that made our lives so much easier:

• Label all your food containers with the cooking date. It will spare you the mental math every time you open the fridge to get something to eat.
• Even with a meticulous meal prep plan, life still happens. This is why it’s important to have some spare frozen cooked meals. Split them into single servings and keep track of their freshness using the chart linked above.
• Keep your meal ingredients separated. For example, there are some meals that will get soggy if they sit in the fridge all week, like wraps, sandwiches and leafy salads. It’s better to assemble them the night before you actually eat them. Same thing goes for creams that contain acids, like lemon juice, or dairy, like greek yogurt. It’s advised not to prepare them too much in advance.

1.) Consistency Is Key

As we said in the beginning, it’s all in the process. And the key element here is consistency.

You may not get it the first time but you need to persevere and keep the end goal in mind. As you hone your meal prepping skills, slicing and dicing will eventually come to you like second nature. Always remember that it saves your health and your wallet in the long run. Also, you won’t need to clean the kitchen every day and argue with your family about what to make for every meal.

If you notice that you’re losing interest, keep an eye on meal prep Pinterest boards; they’re a great source of inspiration. Or join the subreddit r/mealprepsunday where people like you and me share their meal prep pictures, tips and hacks, and celebrate the little successes of the meal prepping life!

How about you? Do you currently meal prep? If so, how is it going for you? Do you have any secret to make it easier? Or have you never tried it before? If yes, let us know in the comments what you need to get started, we would more than happy to help you! 

Read more: Top 5 Healthy Food Blogs to Follow For Easy Recipes