Episode 187: Meal Prep Made Simple

Staying consistent with nutrition doesn’t require complicated meal plans or hours in the kitchen. Learn how to use simple meal prep strategies to build balanced meals around your personal macros while making nutrition more manageable during menopause.

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Becoming MindStrong Episode 187: Meal Prep Made Simple

Speaker 1  0:00  
Number one, I do not meal prep anymore. Number two, I'm a person who does not enjoy meal prepping. But that said, I do have a a decent amount of tips and tricks for meal prep prep period. And where I think I can add some value is for those of us who don't love meal prepping. Here's how we can make it a little bit more bearable. So I'm gonna call this meal prep made easy, especially if you hate to meal prep. Check it out. As you heard me say in the intro, I am not a person who enjoys meal prep. I did it for many years of my life when I was a teacher. I do not do it anymore now that I work from home, and I think the fact that I'm a person who hates to cook, so therefore does not enjoy the meal prep experience either. It gives me some insight into how to make it as easy as possible and a little bit more bearable. So, like everything I teach here, I want to start kind of big picture and concepts, and then we'll get our hands in the dirt and we'll get to more logistical and tactical tools you can put to use. Blanket statement: You do not have to meal prep to make nutrition a sustainable lifestyle. The pros of it is that you don't have to think or do as much in the moment, right? You're front loading the work, and that said, if you're someone like me who doesn't enjoy it, and your lifestyle allows for you not to do it, by all means, don't do it, right? And I'll give you a personal example to kind of drive this home. Back when I was a teacher, I mean, I had an hour commute to work. I was at school for about 10 hours a day. I had an hour commute back. I'd go straight to the gym. If I didn't meal prep, I was kind of screwed for the day, right? Because then I'm relying on cafeteria food and trying to make it till I get home. And then we all know I'd be in front of the fridge shoving whatever I can in my mouth, so meal prepping was the only way I could think of to make sure that I was sticking to my goals. Now, years later, MindStrong has been my my full time gig for quite a long time. I work from home, so I don't do a traditional meal prep. And in a second, when we get to the logistics, I'll tell you what we sometimes do just to make life easier in the moment. So I say all that to say, number one question: When people say, "Do I have to meal prep? blanket answer, no. Number two, you know my thing with understanding the why, right? My answer would be, why? Is it going to make your life easier, specifically because of your job, your career, or do you feel like you have to? Or there's that word should, right? You don't have to. You this is not a must or a should. It's simply a question of will this make your life easier? Okay. Now, with that said, if you are going to meal prep, there's two ways that we can approach this. So again, I'm going to start big picture, the two ways, and then we'll really get into more of the nuts and bolts of it. Option one is what I did when I was a teacher. Option two is what we'll occasionally do now, where my partner and I both work from home. When I was a teacher, I did a full-blown meal prep, meaning I made five containers for my breakfast. I made five containers for my lunch. I didn't make dinner because I just had a later dinner when I got home from the gym, and then I would prep all of my snacks. the The cons: it took a bunch of time, right? You're creating 10 meals plus snacks in there. The pros: I never had to think about food. I'd wake up in the morning, or I would do it the night before. I'd stuff my my snacks, my meals for the next day into my giant lunch box because I had a huge one. My students used to tease me for, and I was ready to go.

Speaker 1  3:22  
So you're front loading the work, but then you don't have to think about it for the rest of the week. And we're going to talk more about what that looks like. Hey, but again, we're starting big picture. What we occasionally do now, and we do not do this every week because again, working from home, we don't need to. But sometimes we'll do more of a batch meal prep, meaning we'll just make a large thing of protein. We'll just make a large thing of whatever carb or whatever veggies we want. That way, when we're working from home, we don't have to stop the workday and like create this full meal. It's like, all right, let me just grab from this container, this container, this container, heat it up. I'm good to go. So, for the purposes of just starting big picture in this conversation, there's two types of meal prep we can do. One is much more time, much more hands on the dirt, as I love to say. Right, you're going to set yourself up with for success with small meals throughout the day. The other one that's not as time consuming, and on the other side, the work isn't completely front loaded. But we can make large batches, so in the moment we still construct our own meals, but we don't have to prep everything from the start. So I want to start with that one because that's like that's the bigger picture one. And then as we get into more logistics of a full meal prep, what we're learning for those tools will come into play. When we batch meal prep, I am always thinking in terms of macros. So if you are new here, if you don't know what the term macros are, pause this episode. I have tons of episodes about it. Blanket statement: There are three nutrients of which our body needs the most: carbohydrates, fat, and protein. They are called macronutrients. We call them macros. Every human's body is designed to run on a balance of carbs. Fat protein, carbs do not make you fat. Fat do not make you fat. Most of us does not make you fat. Most of us are not getting enough protein in our day. So the the Cliff Notes version is macros equals carbs fat protein. When we are batch meal prepping, I'm thinking in terms of carbs fat protein. Now vegetables are technically a carb. I kind of think of them differently, and that'll make more sense as we go. So if I'm going to batch meal prep, meaning I don't want to make 10 individual meals for the week, I just want a couple big containers in my fridge. So when I get 15 minutes of a break in between meetings, I don't have to go cook meat or cook tofu. I can just grab it out of the big batch, heat it up, shove it in my face, and get back to work. You want to chew your food and slow down to the best of your ability. So I'll think in terms of macros, meaning what kind of protein or proteins do I want for the week? Now, Swomo, my partner, is a vegan, so we tend to eat a lot of tofu in our house, a lot of sometimes we'll have tempeh, sometimes we'll have seitan. She's gluten free, so we don't have seitan as much. But we'll have a lot of vegan or vegetarian based proteins. I am not fully vegan or vegetarian, so I still enjoy fish. I still enjoy chicken. I don't eat a ton of red meat, but but sometimes I'll have them there. So we'll decide. Okay, maybe we're okay eating the same thing every day this week, so we'll just batch a bunch of tofu. Maybe we want some variety, so maybe we'll do some fish, a little bit of chicken, a little bit tofu. Whatever it is, purposes of this conversation, I we are we are cooking a large amount of protein in one fell swoop. So then we have one container in our fridge that is the protein container. Next, we're going to move on to carbs. You cannot lose weight in a peri or postmenopausal body without complex carbs, which means fiber-rich carbs. In our house, we like jasmine rice. We love sweet potatoes. Quinoa is another good one.

Speaker 1  6:56  
So again, we'll decide: do we want to eat the same thing all week, or do we want two for a variety, so we might make a big thing of jasmine rice and a a couple of sweet potatoes. We'll just pre-cook those, throw them in the fridge. Okay, fats. We don't do this as much. We'll just kind of keep some avocado in the house. We we always get some good olive oil, coconut oil. That's a little bit easier. You don't really have to prep that as much. Then veggies, as you heard me say, those are technically carbs, and I'm going to separate them because we want to make sure that we're getting vitamins and minerals from our vegetables. So maybe we'll we'll roast some vegetables, maybe we'll make a salad, some container in there that's vegetables. Now, from hearing me describe this, right? This is this is very like throw it at the wall and just get it done, kind of thing. We have a big container with protein, a big container with carbs, a big container with vegetables, and then some fat sources around the house. Again, avocado tends to be our our go-to, and then olive oil, coconut oil, which means when I have a quick break between meetings, what that doesn't give me the freedom to do is run into the kitchen, grab a pre-made container, heat it up, and eat it. Right, that would be lovely. That would actually be a great time saver, and it would make sure I'm hitting my macros during the day. And I don't want to spend that much time on the weekend meal prepping. So this kind of splits the difference between a full meal prep and no meal prep. Where now, when I have a quick break. I just grab a plate, grab some protein, grab some carbs, put a fat source on there, grab some veggies, heat up my meal, and eat it. Okay, so that that's kind of the quick and dirty version of meal prep. It works well if you work from home. If you don't work from home, if your life looks more like my teacher days, where it's like I am gone 1012, hours a day. If I don't meal prep, I'm living off delis and fast food and Instacart. Then you might want to consider a full meal prep. If you are loving this video, you will love my deep dive training how to fire up your metabolism in menopause and beyond. You can use the link below to reserve your seat, and I'll see you in there. Now, before we talk through what that looks like, let me say this up front: There are a lot of companies out there now, and some decent ones too, that are very macro focused. Right, a lot of us have seen the companies that will send you ingredients that you can make your own dinner. That's a little different than what I'm talking about here. Their companies, you can literally go on their website and say, "I want 30 grams of protein, 50 grams of carbs, 40 grams of fat, and they'll let you construct meals around your your macros. Now they're not cheap, right? Especially with them, they tend to do overnight shipping only to keep things fresh. So usually it's the shipping part that's that's where the price comes in. I've used those before. My partner loves to cook, so I don't use them anymore. But when I was single and lived alone and was not good at feeding myself, I used to always use those companies because, to me, number one, making sure I was hitting my macros, and number two, making it as simple as possible, that was worth the investment. My kind of hack is that I would order two weeks worth of food at a time because if I'm going to pay for shipping. May as well make it worth my while, and then I would freeze them. Not great if you've ever had reheated chicken. It's not the best thing in the world, and if what you're focused on is efficiency, it's absolutely to me it was worth the investment at the time for the energy it saved and to ensure that I was hitting my macros. If that's not in the books for you, then we can do a bigger meal prep.

Speaker 1  10:21  
Some people meal prep once a week, and they have it for the full week. You might notice your food gets a little funky towards the end of the week, so some people will do two smaller meal preps. They'll do like a Sunday and a Wednesday. For me, I would do Sunday to get me through the week. Definitely could notice it by the end of the week. My food was not feeling this fresh. Again, I tend to. I'm only a picky eater. If I go out to eat, I want to make sure my food is the best of the best. If I'm cooking for myself, I just want to get food in my mouth. So if I'm going to do a more detailed meal prep, I am still thinking the exact same way of the batch prep. That's why I started there, meaning I'm going to separate this into macros. I am going to decide what one to two protein sources do I want for the week, what one to two carb sources do I want for the week, what one to two fat sources do I want for the week, and what veggies do I want for the week? Do I want salad? Do I want roasts or whatever? In my brain, those are my four categories: protein, carbs, fat, veggies. Again, knowing that veggies are a carb, but we're separating them here, and I'm going to batch cook them the way that I just described. Okay, little pro tip: I don't like that word because I am not a pro when it comes to cooking. But things like sweet potatoes take longer to cook than I don't know what the example here would be-grilled chicken. Okay, so I'll always think about what's going to take the longest to cook and start that first, so that I could start the quick hit things after and kind of multitask. So I'm going to batch prep just like in the other scenario. The only difference now is that once all my batches are are cooked, I'm gonna my counter is gonna look like a science experiment because I'm gonna lay out five containers. We'll call that breakfast, and then I'm going to do it again for lunch, right? Right now, I'm just speaking in hypotheticals. Then I'm going to construct meals. Now, the one thing I cannot answer on this podcast is how much of each should you eat, right? If you've hung out here before, you know macros are very personalized. All these online meal plans of like eat this much protein, eat this many grams of carbs every lunch-it's complete BS because your macro numbers are going to be very different than your best friends, going to be very different than their bosses. So you're going to construct meals around your macros, around how you like to eat. Right? Are you someone who likes a bigger breakfast, a smaller lunch? Do you like a smaller breakfast, bigger lunch? Do you like to save more for dinner when you get home? Are you someone who doesn't like a big dinner, so we're going to spend more of our macros at lunch. So how much you put in is going to depend on you and your body. For most people, four ounces of protein is kind of the the standard. I always liked a little bit more than that because I like to knock out my protein early in the day. I always try to get at least again. It's going to vary person to person. Some people are going to do a half cup of rice. Some people are going to do a full cup of rice. It depends how you want to quote unquote spend your macros. So all that to say, you are now going to take your batch meal prep: your protein, carbs, fat, vegetables, and we're going to start constructing meals. So let's say for you personally, you want lunch to be five ounces of tofu, one cup of quinoa, half an avocado, and some salad. I'm going to construct that in my little container. Slap a label, slap the top on it, put it aside. I'm going to build out all my meals, whether it's just lunch, whether it's breakfast and lunch. Going to throw them in the fridge, ready for the week. Here's the key. Actually, let me pause and recap before we go in.

Speaker 1  13:42  
Two types of meal prep. One batch. This works well if you work from home, so it's more of a grab and go, grab and construct your plate, I should say. Two, if you're someone who's out of the house a lot, we're going to think about it the same way: protein, carbs, fat, vegetable. The only difference is we're going to construct meals based on what works for us in our macros. Here's the key, and to me, this is the most important part. It's very easy to write off as rainbows and glitter and unicorns, but it is neuroscience. I don't think there's many people in the world who are like, man, you know what I'd love to do on Sunday? I would love to take three hours of the one of two days off that I get a week and spend it prepping for the week, right? Maybe there's people out there. I am not one of them. When I would meal prep, I would kind of in the beginning before I did this work, kind of grumbled to myself, "Oh, this is not how I want to be spending my Sunday. I have so many. I work all week. This is my day off. So, the more that we can wire our brain of why we're doing this in Mindstrong, we talk a lot about educating on the why, right? When we can lean into that for ourselves, and when we can find ways to combine something we don't love or may not want to do with something we love and want to do, we're going to set ourselves up for success. Here's what I mean by that. The way that I learn to find to make meal prep bearable is I love listening to podcasts, especially business podcasts. I, if you gave me a full day off, I would just have headphones on all day binging podcasts because of my schedule. I don't get to do that very often, so I'm listening to like 15 minutes of a podcast while I'm walking my dogs. I'm like squeezing it in at the gym. I'm listening to podcasts. I'm like, I finally have an hour, hour and a half where I can really dive in. So I started using meal prep time in my brain. I don't care about the fact I'm meal prepping right now. I get a full few hours where I have nothing I'm obligated to do besides listen to these podcasts. Yeah, my hands were cooking. My hands were doing an action, but in my brain, that was podcast time, right? Maybe for you, that's an audio book. Maybe for you, that's music, right? How often do we just get to sit there and listen to music? Maybe it's chatting with your best friend on the phone, throw some AirPods in, and just chat the time away. The more we can get away from the chore of what we're doing and get into something we enjoy, and our hands happen to be doing the chore. The easier it's going to get. Here was the most powerful shift for me. I used to always thank past Rachel for the work she put in, and that sounds a little bonkers, but bear with me. Especially when I was a teacher, and it was grab and go. Right, there were times where the school day would fly by. I did not have time to eat, and it'd be the end of the day, and I was so hungry, and I'd be like, "Oh my gosh, I have my full meal in my giant lunchbox that I haven't even touched, and I'd get so excited, like I don't have to use the vending machine, I don't have to go eat garbage in the teacher lounge, and I would grab that meal out of my lunchbox, and I would literally say in my head, not out loud. Good looking out, past Rachel. Thank you, past Rachel. Because our brains, humans, we are pleasure-seeking creatures, right, by human nature. So the next Sunday that came around, and I didn't really feel like meal prepping, which I never did. Right, it is not my jam. But I could take a moment and be like, you know what? Remember on Wednesday when I was so hungry and I knew what was going to happen if I didn't get good food, nutritious food in my body.

Speaker 1  17:08  
We don't use the terms good food, bad food. I didn't get nutritious food. I knew I was about to hit up the vending machine. It was going to be a slippery slope. I was going to feel like garbage. I probably had to skip the gym because I just ate Skittles, whatever it was. But I had that prepped in my bag, ready to go. Like, how good did that feel? Good looking out. So now, what if I just pop my headphones on, throw in a podcast, knock out my meal prep, knowing I'm setting myself up for success the next week? The more that we can lean into the pleasure, the success, the the way that this is helping to level up our lives, the more we the more apt we are to do it. So to me, that's more important than any logistics of meal prep we can learn. Right, all of us can figure out how to cook some food, throw it in some containers. Most of us, even if we know it would benefit us, it's tough to do because it's time we don't want to spend on yet another chore. So my two favorite workarounds for that: number one, forget about the chore of meal prepping. Focus on what do I love that I can pair with it, and number two, thanking our past self for putting the time in gives us that dopamine release. So, do you have to meal prep? Absolutely not. And if you are going to, the next question I would ask myself, is what kind of meal prep works best for me? Can I batch do it, stick it in the fridge, go bill myself a plate, or for my lifestyle, do I actually need to construct five to 10 meals a week? If yes, am I willing to put that time in, or for me, is it worth investing in a meal prep company? If I'm going to do it, I'm going to start the same way. I'm going to batch cook, and then I'm going to take it and I'm going to construct my plate according to my personal macros. Real quickly, if you are loving my content, I want to invite you to apply for a free one-to-one strategy session with my incredible all-female team. In your session, we'll talk about where you are, where you want to be, a game plan to bridge that gap and see if one-to-one coaching is a fit. You can use the link in the description below or the first pinned comment to access the application, and then don't forget to check out this next video for even more help with your menopausal journey.

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