Prepare for the Week Ahead of Time

 

Monday’s…

Are you ready to start the week?

The week can be so hectic with work, school, kids, chores, and many daily activities that happen in one persons day. This can cause you to really “fall off track” or get behind on your chores. This often causes you to grab something quick to eat, whether that is fast food or frozen meals. Just making the easiest, quickest choice vs the smarter choice.

Somethings you can do to prepare head for the week so you don’t make unhealthy eating choices.

Prepare your meat before you freeze it.

One of my most favorite things that we do, is each time we buy meat at the grocery store, we prepare it before we freeze it. What that means is we get all of the cutting board stuff out of the way. We trim the fat off the chicken. Cut the chicken to portion sizes and then portion into how much we normally need for one meal.

 

This is a little bit time consuming when you buy a lot of meat at once. We prefer to buy in bulk as much as possible so it can take some time to clean this up. However, it is saving us so much time during the week. We are able to just pull out what we need, let it thaw, and then cook it. We already it cut it up so we didn’t need to dirty the cutting board or knives. This saved us time not only on preparing but on clean up. May not seem like a lot of time, but coming someone who does not love to cook, its definitely easier to cook meals each day.

Plan Lunches Ahead

We do this a couple different ways. One easy way is to plan to cook enough to have leftovers for lunch the next day. This is often the simplest when you can do it. Or you can batch cook lunch in the beginning of the week and have everything ready to grab and go. This is good if you don’t mind eating mostly the same thing all week. Or you can do a combination of leftovers and batch cooking.

 

Most commonly we cook enough chicken breast for lunch on Sunday. Usually we just bake or grill them, much simpler than using the skillet… and less messy. Then we buy some lettuce, we like to mix up the greens, some romaine, some red leaf, maybe a little arugula and we chop it all up and mix it together. We use these Rubbermaid Fresh Works Containers to store our mixed greens in. We also like to keep grape tomatoes on hand vs just the slicing ones, since these are super easy to grab. Then as we make dinner each night we just prep ourselves a salad or maybe a wrap for lunch. Grab a handful of lettuce, handful of grape tomatoes, and handful of chicken. Then add whatever other healthy toppings you like. Makes prepping lunch so quick and easy. And you can do this with other foods. Such as cook a batch of quinoa for the week, slice up some peppers, and mix that up with your chicken. Get creative. This Mediterranean Quinoa Salad is another big favorite

Batch Cook For Dinners

You can easily batch cook different things for dinner also. Making chicken or salad ahead of time could work for dinner as well as lunch. Even make some quinoa or rice and make enough for a couple meals. Then change up the protein and veggie you are having if you want. Look for some healthy casseroles you can bake and eat for a couple days. Try some things out and see if it really does save you time.

Keep Breakfast Simple

Breakfast is often the most rushed or skipped meal of the day. It’s because people sleep in and get up with just enough time to get showered, dressed, kids dressed, off to work. And no coffee does not count as breakfast. So here you could prep breakfast the night before or at the beginning of the week. Egg Muffins are so good and easy to make and heat up well in the morning. You can also make different varieties of them by mixing up what you put in. Or if you want to make it even simpler make an egg casserole then divide it into portions. Overnight oats you can make the night before. Maybe a meal replacement shake. If you like to use your own fresh ingredients then you can portion out and bag them or a few days ahead of time.

Snacks

You have to have some easy grab on the go type snacks. Chop of veggies ahead of time, maybe even put them in portioned baggies so you can just grab and go. Keep some good fruits on hard, bananas and apples are pretty easy to keep with you. Hard boiled eggs are good to prep and keep in the fridge also. There are many different ways you can spice up a hard boiled egg to if you need to keep things interesting.

There are a lot of different things you can do to really be prepared for the week to help you make smarter choices when it comes to eating. Also, know that you are not going to be perfect at this overnight. Start with one thing and try it out, once you have the hang of it add something else to your routine.