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When I started No Buy July last month, I knew that meal prep was going to be my biggest challenge. Most of my frivolous spending had been on takeout meals, impulse snacking, and date nights out. It was going to take a lot of discipline and planning to kick the habit for a whole month! Luckily, I’d picked up some meal prep tips over the past few years that really came in handy.
There are the basics, of course, such as picking a single day to prep (e.g. “#MealPrepSunday“). These meal prep tips, though, took me a while to figure out, and I’m excited to be able to share them with you all to save you time, money, and potential frustration. If you’re looking to conquer your own No Spend Month challenge, or just want to improve your meal prep game, read on!
Nail a Few Key Recipes
It’s critical to find a few recipes that you can replicate on a regular basis. It helps if you can make them in bulk, and it’s especially important that you don’t get sick of them after only a few meals. I find the most useful concept here is a “recipe framework”. It allows you to mix and match ingredients to avoid food fatigue. For example, here’s my smoothie “equation”, which I learned from the Tone It Up nutrition plan back in the day:
1 cup fruit + 1 cup greens + (1/2 banana or 1/4 avocado) + 1 cup plant-based milk + 1 scoop protein
It’s as simple as that! Similarly, I follow this recipe for my go-to salad:
Lots of greens + protein (e.g. shrimp, chickpeas) + raw veggies + berries/corn + seeds + dressing (e.g. 1 tsp balsamic vinegar + 1 tsp olive oil)
When it comes to true recipes, I’m a by-the-book kind of chef. It’s taken me a while to build my confidence in the kitchen. I still prefer to follow a recipe to the letter, so it’s important to find simple recipes with ingredients that I know I’ll have on hand. From there, you can expand to new and more complex meals when you have the time to try them out. My latest favourite recipe is the Healthy Zucchini Muffins from Well Plated.
Leverage Your Home Garden
Whether you can manage a full-on backyard farm or just a pot of herbs on your kitchen windowsill, I highly recommend starting a home garden. It’s fun to watch your plants grow and flourish over time!
The best tactic is to choose vegetables that you will use often, especially either in large or very small quantities. For example, I love to have dill on hand for a couple of my favourite recipes, but I hate how much dill goes to waste when I purchase a bunch from the grocery store. All I need is two tablespoons! Alternatively, I can’t get enough cucumber, zucchini, kale, or tomato, so those are great options for our backyard garden. Choose your ideal herbs and veggies, and let Mother Nature take care of the rest! (Also, like, water and weed them. They’ll appreciate it.)
Over-Pack Your Lunch Bag
They say you can never be too prepared, and this is definitely true when it comes to meal prep. If you work outside your home, you’ll probably be bringing at least one of your meals to the office. In order to avoid the expense of unexpected snacking, though, you’ll want to bring your snacks from home. And what if a work emergency keeps you at your desk into the evening? Or an early morning meeting interrupts your usual breakfast routine?
This might sound a bit extreme, but I spent most of No Buy July bringing up to five meals to the office every day. Yep, that’s breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner. And sometimes dessert. I’ve mentioned on the blog before that my hours can be a bit long, so it was important for me to be as prepared as possible. While I don’t expect everyone to bring every meal to the office each day, ensuring you have a fully-stocked lunch bag can be a definite advantage.
Separate Meal Prepping from Dieting
The Tone It Up nutrition plan kick-started my meal prep journey back in 2017. For someone whose entire culinary repertoire was pasta with tomato sauce, this was definitely a step up. I spent months learning to follow the structure, portion my meals, and find my favourite “#TIUapproved” recipes. But I also spent those months agonizing about whether or not to accept the “unapproved” free baked goods that always seemed to appear at my office.
Even as I moved away from a specific eating regimen, I still associated meal prepping with dieting. If I were preparing my meals ahead of time, shouldn’t I make them healthy? If I had made my afternoon snack, shouldn’t I turn down these cookies my coworker brought in from home?
Naturally the answers to these questions depend on the goals of your meal prep. For me, the goal during No Buy July was financial, so my stress about “unapproved” snacking was unfounded. It was very important for me to make the mental shift from dieting to simply planning my meals. This helped me stay successful over the entire duration of No Buy July!
Now that No Buy July is over, I’m continuing to meal prep, but at a reduced rate. (Let’s just say I’m not bringing all five meals to the office this month!) Still, I’m glad I had this experience, as I think it really helped me up my meal prep game. I hope these tips help you achieve your savings goals, whether you’re working through a No Spend Month or simply saving a few bucks. Share your best meal prep tips in the comments below!
