4 Crucial Tips For Meal Prepping

By Thomas Hart on March 22, 2020

You’re in college, which means two things: you’re way too busy and you’re on a budget. You don’t have the time or the money to cook every meal willy-nilly or order takeout all the time. You gotta meal prep! But getting into the habit of meal prepping is pretty tough for someone new to the meal-prepping scene, so I’ve got a few tips to help you really boost your meal-prep level.

First tip: Make a schedule or plan. This is especially important for those of you like me (skinny males of average height) out there who could eat a horse only to have tremendous guilt to show for it. Respect your own eating habits and know what you can and can’t eat. You want to make sure that what you cook can last your intended amount of time, so plan it! Make a calendar or schedule of sorts with your prepped meals available shown, along with an approximation of how many meals are left. For example, one of the meals I often make is a huge helping of spaghetti, which is good for about six to eight meals. So, on my fridge at home I keep a list on a white board and write down “spaghetti” and will put a tally mark when I have eaten it for a meal. That way, it’s easier to plan what meals you’ll have ahead of time and when you’ll need to prep again.

Spaghetti is my favorite meal to make ahead of time. Reminds me of home. Source: Pexel.com

Second tip: quantity over quality. My fun reversal of a nonsense adage aside, this is really about choosing what foods you can make easily in a large quantity for a low cost. I mentioned spaghetti earlier because it’s a good example. Though its price depends on what you put into it besides noodles, pasta is fairly easy to make in a large quantity. Spaghetti takes me about an hour to cook and feeds me for four days. Pasta isn’t alone in this, however. Rice is a budget food staple that’s cheap, comes in large bags, lasts forever, and is easy to make. Soups and stews are another great choice, provided you have a large enough container to store them. If you must have meat, go for ground beef or chicken.

Rice is pretty easy to make meals out of because its cheap and goes easily with a ton of different ingredients. Source: Pexels.com

Third tip: season your food. Salt and pepper and spices and herbs all exist for a reason. Don’t create a huge helping of food just to not eat it because it has no taste. Salt and pepper are a necessity,

Fourth tip: make more than one food. This one for some reason confounded me for the longest time. If you want to meal prep, make two or three meals ahead of time rather than just one, so you can maximize variety in your diet and keep yourself from going insane because all you’ve had to eat for the past seventeen days is spaghetti. I may have been there.

With these tips, you’ll become at least appropriately adept at meal prepping and will gain a whole lot of value from it as you eat well while saving money.

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