7 Practical Tips for Meal Prepping on a Busy Schedule

9 out of 10 Americans have meal prepped at least once in their life, but only 44% say they currently meal prep.

Aiding fitness is a popular reason for Meal prepping but a survey showed that eating a better and balanced diet only combines a total percentage of 32%. Much lower than expected, yea?

Major concerns surrounding meal prepping include food repetition, potential spoilage, increased grocery costs, and the extra time required for meal planning. A quarter of people even think that meal prepping can reduce the quality of their meals. While others prefer not to meal prep so that they meet their cravings and enjoy themselves throughout the week.

However, meal planning doesn’t have to take time. Also, other concerns you have might be owing to the lack of knowledge on how to meal plan in a busy schedule.

When you have a busy schedule, meal prepping could be daunting as you won't even have time to even ideate suitable recipes for your meals let alone prepare them.

But, before you go on to read about the tips for meal prepping when on a busy schedule, let’s look at the benefits of meal prepping.

Benefits of Meal Prepping

• Meal Prep Saves Time: You don’t want to find time out of your busy schedule to grab some sweet potatoes when you can buy in bulk, you can batch cook ahead on the weekend and put them in the food storage, this will save a lot of time that you can use to even fill some gaps in your tight schedule. Meal planning and meal prepping breakfasts and lunches for the work week saves you tons of time so you won’t have to bother about cooking for the week
• Meal Prep Saves Money: Shopping in bulk helps you to save cost on groceries, food items, gas, and transportation. Meal prepping for the week not only saves you time from your busy schedule but also helps you to reduce your spending.
• Meal Prep Reduces Food Waste: Wasting food is not far from wasting money.

So when you meal plan ahead of the work week, you’ll be able to know how much you’ll batch cook for the week for the essence of not wasting food. It also helps in portion control; portion control will help you to choose healthy meals in a moderate amount.

Let’s dive straight into the practical tips for meal prepping in a busy schedule

1. Write a Weekly Shopping List

The last thing you want to do when you have a busy schedule is to go to the grocery store each day to get foodstuffs. You can write down a shopping list that you can take along and buy everything you need all at once. Also, you might not remember some essentials when you get to the grocery store because in grocery shopping, you tend to see new things and you might end up buying things you don’t need.

2. Make Use of Slow Cookers

Slow cookers could be an underrated method of meal prepping for a busy person; dump dinner is an example of a slow cooker. Using dump dinners, you don’t have much to do, dump your ingredients in the slow cooker and leave them to cook gradually so it will reduce the cooking that you will do when you arrive from work. Making use of slow cookers will help achieve your meal plan but this time, with less stress.

3. Get Food Saver Vacuum Sealers so You Can Keep Big Batches of Food Fresh

A vacuum sealer is also very functional in meal prepping; it might come in handy at any time. When you have a food vacuum seal bag, you can batch cook a large quantity even if you are not ready to eat it, all you just need to do is seal them in airtight bags and put them in the freezer. A vacuum sealer will preserve your food's freshness and flavor and limit waste.

Get a quality vacuum sealer to keep your food ever fresh.

4. Freeze Leftover Preps

If you have a big batch of ingredients (think veggies). And you think you can’t use them all at once, instead of wasting them rather put them in the food storage, so you’ll be able to prepare them easily when you come back from work, or when you don’t have time to prepare breakfast.

Other food saving tips:

• 10 Smart Ways to Prepare for a Food Shortage and Reduce Waste
• Top 17 Advantages to Vacuum Sealing Your Food
• Things to Know About Vacuum Sealing Vegetables

5. Prepare Easy Meals

Sometimes, you might also settle for easy meals. With easy meals, you save time and also won’t spend much time prepping and preparing the recipe. Preparing sweet potatoes won’t be a bad idea in a busy schedule too as the meal prep can’t take time.

But, you should always consider eating healthy meals when meal prepping easy meals.

6. Select Your Meal Plan Day

Select a single meal plan day to decide how you'll do the meal plan for the whole week, this can often be weekends. According to a survey, Sunday is the most popular day for meal prepping. When you have a busy schedule, you can prepare meals for the week on Sunday evening by batch cooking the whole meal for the week in a day. This will save you time, money, and stress and also gives space to cover some work in your schedule.

7. Try Mix and Match meals

When you want to meal plan under a busy schedule, you can also repurpose some of your already prepped recipes. You can mix and match some already prepped ingredients and turn them into an entirely different meal. For example: you can use prepped ground beef or turkey to make a stir-fry with prepped veggies. You can also use leftover banana bread to make French toast.