After reading
this and dozens of
@Kaido posts regarding meal prep I may start doing it.
Any money saving tips? Any suggestions on keeping lunches/dinner interesting without getting bored?
Interested in nutrient dense, low cal/carb, filling and delicious meals.
Prepare yourself for a knowledge dump, my friend! This guide will literally change your life if you actually use it!
My goal with this post is twofold:
- To educate you about how your body works & how meal-prepping works
- To give you a clear path forward & to give you the confidence that you can do it, not because of hope, but because of trust - trust that you both know how to do it & have a system that will support you in doing it
In order to do that, you need to bring a few things to the table:
- An open mind, so that you're willing to listen & learn how things actually work
- Throw shame (from being overweight) & fear (that it's gonna be hard) & apathy (quitting) & other barriers out the window - it all boils down to a simple checklist that you follow in order to get results. It's not magic, it's just boring science lol. So to be clear, no one is attacking anyone, no one is shaming anyone, you're not a bad person, etc. - you're just about to level up your food & health game!
My history, in brief:
- I have been overweight twice in my life, both times about 50 pounds or so
- First time I did "clean eating" & was super naive & blind as to how things really worked - I did lose the weight, but it wasn't sustainable
- Second time (because it wasn't sustainable) was because of IIFYM (will explain later), and I've been able to stay in-shape because it is sustainable (and because it works, not because it's a temporary diet, but because it's how your body actually operates)
The project we'll be talking about here is "meal-prepping using IIFYM". This has several benefits:
- You will save stupid amounts of money
- You will have great energy all the time
- You will look great & have both the knowledge & the system to not only achieve great results, but keep them for as long as you want to
- Your GI tract will function properly
- The weight will fall off like magic, no difficult gym time required
- You won't have to give up a single thing you like to eat, everything you love is included on this meal plan
- You won't have to give up going out to eat
- It completely removes the hassle & argument of "what's for dinner"
- You get to eat really great food all the time!
Before we go any further:
- I want you to keep your "mojo" throughout this post
- That means keeping clear focus of the point & the goal, which is "doing meal-prep, to lose weight, by eating according to your macros" (all will be explained!)
- It's easy to get lost in the following wall of text; just remember that the point is to define your macros & then setup a meal-prep system to help you hit your macros every day - THAT'S IT!
For starters, I want to clear up a misconception about low-carbs:
- You typically only need to go low-carb if you are sugar-sensitive, i.e. insulin resistance (some form of of diabetes, PCOS, etc.)
- Outside of a medical need, you'll want to get the nutrients & energy your body needs from carbs
- Low-carb is not required to lose weight; I actually recommend against it (barring it being required for a medical situation)
Instead, I recommend doing macros, specifically IIFYM:
- Nobody every really sits you down & explains how your body works & what macros are
- Part of the reason for this is lack of public knowledge
- Another part of the reason for this is that everyone is trying to sell you products & services - as long as you remain ignorant about how your macros work in relation to your body, you will be subject to falling for whatever product, service, diet, etc. is popular at the moment
I wrote a tutorial about how macros works here:
- Edit: I hate these embedded-content features. I set this reddit link to be a link, but it converts it into an embedded post. Fortunately, it only seems to do it for the first two posts. Oh well.
-
So in a nutshell:
- Figure out your ideal bodyweight using a calculator. Subtract your current weight from your ideal bodyweight. That is now your weight-loss project. An aggressive weight-loss program should lose a max of 2 pounds a week (remember it's on a bit of a bell curve, so it's more of an average over time, because the first ten pounds will fall off quickly due to water-weight). So divide your weight-loss project weight by 2 and that's approximately how many weeks it will take to get you to where you should be - in a health, controlled manner that you can maintain for the rest of your life, because (1) you're not going low-carb unless you medically have to, and (2) you're not changing your diet, just your intake, and (3) you're not starving yourself, it's just a calorie-intake reduction.
- Calculate your macros using the IIFYM calculator (use a burner email address, as email is required & they do send out a lot of emails). In a nutshell, you can only lose, maintain, or gain weight (weight being both muscle & fat). You do through calories, which is the fuel your body requires each day - how much energy you burn just being alive (say 2,000 calories) combined with how much you burn moving around during the day (say 400 calories) - so you might burn 2,400 calories for maintenance. You would eat more calories to gain weight & less to lose weight. However, that's not the whole picture, because when you're overweight, you're full of fat not muscle, and when you're anorexic, you've got neither fat nor muscle in sufficient quantities. A calorie is simply a math formula: protein + carbs + fats = calories. So a better way to lose weight is to eat at a reduced caloric intake (i.e. take in less fuel, which will reduce your weight because science) by eating according to your macros, that way you feed you're feeding your body correctly. The calculator gives the numbers you need for your specific situation.
- So you now know what your target weight is, how much weight you need to lose, how long it will take, and what your macros are..what next? Well, here's where the fun begins...you can literally lose weight simply by eating according to your macros, no exercise required (although I do recommend taking care of your body by doing exercise!). But the focus here is weight-loss by eating according to your daily macros. The more strict you are, the better & faster results you will get. So how do you hit your macro numbers every day? Well, you can do it the hard way - make everything from scratch for every single meal & weigh & measure it all out at home (RIP free time), or go out to eat for every meal - chain restaurants all have their macros available on their website (RIP budget). The answer, of course, is meal-prep! Meal prepping is what allows you easily hit your macros, because you're not having to slave away cooking all day every day or eat your wallet going out to eat.
To recap:
- You now have a clear schedule. If you want to lose 100 pounds, then 100 / 2 (max weight loss of 2 pounds per week) = 50 weeks. You're free to go faster because anxiety tells you to do so, but do a google image search for "loose skin" & decide if you want to violate the weight-loss speed rules, lol. You're going to be alive until you die (which is hopefully like 100 years old!), so there's no rush - do it right, learn how to do macros, learn how to do meal-prep, and learn how to not only keep it off, but maintain the body & energy you want to!
- It is not longer a question mark for how to lose weight: you simply eat according to your macros - you're not starving yourself or doing some funky, impossible-to-maintain-long-term diet, you're just feeding your body correctly, and you're not giving up the foods you love.
- The best way to do that, imo, is through meal-prep, which allows you to reap numerous benefits, including eating great all the time, feeling great all the time, looking great, and saving money.
Great! So what's the next step? The next step is to implement a meal plan. This sounds hard, but I've spent years designing a great meal-prep plan, so you can take advantage of my checklists for getting successful results consistently, if you'd like! This is the part where most people fail at, because we're going to step over a line in the sand between "almost work" (talking about it, thinking about it, posting about it, etc.)" into "real work" (actually doing it). Everybody has an exercise machine, but 99.9% of people don't use them & they end up as clothing hangers & dust-collection devices...not because they don't do their jobs, but because, without a system (i.e. an exercise program), it's really hard to maintain that willpower to keep the motivation going. So, we're just going to remove motivation, willpower, and self-discipline from the equation all together! Instead, we're going to use alarms & checklists. Sounds real exciting, eh? It's actually not as bad as it sounds, as long as you're willing to work through a checklist, haha!
So what's the justification for doing a meal-prep system? For starters, labor reduction - unless you're on Food Network & have production assistants to help you out, cooking every single meal from scratch every single day non-stop forever requires a massive amount of free time & mental energy. If you only eat 3 meals a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), then that's 21 meals per week. If you're only feeding say yourself & your wife, then that's 2 servings per meal, so your job is now to come up with 42 servings per week or 88 servings per month. Good luck with that! lol. So meal-planning & meal-prep helps to reduce the workload in various ways. Second, cost-wise - it takes at least $10 to fill me up at Mcdonalds, and if I did that every day for a month, that's $300 a month just for ONE MEAL for one person a day! You can easily spend $500 to $1,000 eating out per month if you're not careful - not even on
good restaurants, but just on fast-food places & processed foods. One of the reasons I'm driving a Mustang as my daily driver is because I freed up so much money in my food budget that I could afford a sports car, lol. Third, we all like to eat what we like to eat, and we all eat like the same ten things at home, haha. If you're going to cook, why not make the foods you love? Remember, IIFYM means you can eat anything you want, "if it fits your macros". Obviously, that's not a license to eat junk food 24/7, but it means that every meal is a cheat meal & every day is a cheat day - throw guilt out the window, because you're simply eating according to your macros! So let's get started on the meal-prepping checklist:
First: How many people are you feeding?
You? S.O.? Kids? Live-in grandparents? This will define how many servings you need to prepare.
Answer this: I prep for (insert number) people total.
Second: How often do you like to eat?
Some people only eat 3 meals - breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Most people have snacks. I have a friend who only eats one meal a day (granted, over the course of a couple hours, but he has a super busy day & just eats when he gets home). I have another friend who only does lunch & dinner, no snacks. Meal timing doesn't matter because as long as you get your macros into your body by the end of the day, you're good to go. Personally I like 7 "meals" per day - I'm not super hungry when I wake up, so I have something small, then I do breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus a mid-morning snack & a mid-afternoon snack, and always dessert every day because I'm a total sugarholic, lol.
Defining your schedule allows you to set targets, both for recipes to prepare & how to divvy up your macros throughout the day. Think of eating according to your macros like Food Tetris - instead of "I can't eat this", it's "what can I eat to hit my numbers for each eating period?" Waaaaaay more fun that way! You're going to be surprised at how much you'll have to eat to hit your macros, and it may even take a few weeks of discomfort as you adjust to feeding yourself correctly, because it can be a LOT of food! One other question is identify how your body currently works - do you zonk out for the morning if you eat breakfast? Do you get sleepy in the afternoon if you eat a huge meal for lunch? Do straight-up carbs make you tired, so you need to protein-load before you eat a treat?
Answer this: I have (insert number) eating periods per day. They are: (insert meal names & approximate times - ex. breakfast at 9am, lunch at 12pm, etc.)
Third: Do you have any food restrictions?
Some trigger questions:
- Do you have insulin issues & medically require low-carb?
- Do you have any favorite foods that you really love & want to have all the time?
- Do you have any foods that you really hate & don't want to include in your diet? (ex. salad, pickles, etc.)
- Do you have any food allergies?
- Do you have any food intolerances?
- Do you have any religious requirements?
IIFYM is great because you can tweak it according to your personal needs. Your body doesn't know a Snickers Bar from a Porterhouse steak...it just blends it up into mush, pulls out the energy (macros), and pushes the waste out.
Answer this: I have the following special dietary restrictions: (insert any of the above items, or anything else you can think of here)
Fourth: What is your preferred way of eating? (WoE)
Some trigger questions:
- Omnivore - eat everything
- Plant-based
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
- Raw vegan
- Grillmaster (smoke alllll the meats!)
What we're trying to do here is create a clear picture of how you like to eat.
Answer this: I mostly l like to eat (insert type of food).
Fifth: What are your food quality requirements?
I have a simple food rating system:
- Bad
- Mediocre ("meh" food)
- Good
- Great
- Rich
Let's use burgers as an example:
- Bad: We've all had bad food before, like the burgers you get from under the heat lamp at a 7-11...it's food, it fills your belly, but...eh, not so great
- Mediocre ("meh" food): This is like fast-food stuff - BK, McDonalds, etc. It's food, and it's designed to hit your tastebuds, but it's kinda meh.
- Good: This is getting more into places like say Five Guys, where they actually cook the burger from plain ground beef & so on - it's a good burger!
- Great: This is like when you grill a burger at home...nom nom nom. Hard to beat a charcoal-grilled burger in the summer!
- Rich: This is like when you go out for your birthday and get some $12 monstrosity, or a waygu or faux kobe burger, and just go to town on it.
Initially I thought hey, if you're going to cook, why not eat rich food all the time? Turns out steak & cheesecake all the time is actually less fun than it sounds. So I demoted my personal target to "great" food, and reserve rich food for date night, birthdays, or cooking something special. So most of the time, I am to meal-prep really great food, that I enjoy eating, and because it's so good, I don't feel the need to go hit up the vending machine or local fast-food joint or whatever instead of eating my prepared food. This is an important key here, because when you're hungry & it's lunchtime, if you've got crap food prepared, you're not gonna want to eat it lol (speaking from experience!).
However, not
everyone is that interested in food. I know a handful of people for whom food is simply a chore. They don't mind eating plain chicken & broccoli, or living off a liquid meal replacement like Soylent for a couple meals, or are just totally ambivalent about food. So in this case, it's important to set your targets for your food quality, because not everyone cares about food a tremendous degree. For me, I appreciate really good food, and having great food in my life really amps up my day, like packing an amazing homemade chocolate-chip cookie in my lunch. And sometimes I just want something different or something from my childhood that I love, like a Whopper with cheese, and that's totally OK, because I can eat anything, if it fits my macros!
Answer this: My primary food-quality requirement target is (meh/good/great/rich).
Sixth: How often do you want to have to cook?
So with IIFYM, you're totally free to eat out 24/7. You can eat every meal out if you want! But, it most likely will not make your stomach feel very good (lots of grease, preservatives, etc.), plus it will kill your pocketbook. I do know some people who have the budget available to not have to cook & also go to really good restaurants...I have a buddy in NYC with a large budget who eats out pretty much all 3 meals, but eats at really high-end restaurants, where the food is prepared using whole foods by a chef. His monthly food budget, just for himself, often exceeds $2,000. But, he's busy & not into cooking, so it works for him! One of the problems, however, is that if you're not weighing & measuring your food at home in order to control the macros, or eating packaged or fast-food to get the nutritional data off the label, wrapper, or website, then you have to guess, and guesstimating your macros leads to sub-par results, because you don't KNOW, for SURE, what numbers you are eating.
Thus, cooking at home is typically both a cheaper & healthier solution. Plus, you get full control over your meals - you can develop the most amazing recipes that you & your family absolutely
love. And the good news is, cooking is really easy! To clear up another misconception, cooking is not hard - the mental work of cooking is where the difficulty lies. That mental work includes not knowing exactly what you like, not knowing your eating schedule, not knowing your macro targets, rifling through the cupboards & lowering your standards progressively each time you open the fridge until you finally settle on something to eat, having the dinner argument with your S.O., trying to figure out what to get at the grocery store, etc. The good news is that meal-prep solves all of those problems! For starters, read my post here about what is really involved in the process of cooking:
There's only 4 core processes involved with cooking...it's simply a matter of following the directions. Certain things like dough do require developing a relationship with it, because if you're doing bread or pizza or homemade pasta, you have to get a "feel" for it. But it's all learnable & doable! So that's one of the things I want to level-up your confidence with...
cooking is a skill anyone can learn. And it's
EASY! What is NOT easy is all of the mental fog that goes along with it, which we'll disperse by having a high-quality meal-prep system in place, which removes those barriers & that mental weight from the equation!
So if you
have to cook, this leads into the question: how often do you want to have to cook? But before we answer that question...what are the different levels of cooking?
- Cooking from scratch
- Assembly
- Heat & eat
Cooking from scratch means you make the whole meal from scratch. This is great when you're in the mood or have free time, but not so great if you have a job (or a life). Assembly is where you prepare things ahead of time to put together later. For example, you might cook some pulled pork & cookie dough & put both of those in the fridge, so that all you have to do is heat up the pork, add some BBQ sauce, and build a sandwich, and just throw the cookie dough in the oven to bake. Much more approachable! The last one is heat & eat, which is where you use stuff like rectangle meal-prep containers for meals or round meal-prep deli containers for liquid stuff like soup or chili. So you can use these three options to help define your meal-prep plan from week to week & make it easier to function!
As far as meal-prep approaches, there are 3 basic options:
- Once a day cooking (OADC)
- Once a week cooking (OAWC)
- Once a month cooking (OAMC)
There are two other options:
- Cook every meal
- Cook & eat sporadically
Obviously, cooking randomly & eating whatever is not going to get you very good results as far as losing weight & feeling good & being healthy goods. You can also cook every meal, which is great if you live at home and also enjoy cooking and also don't mind doing the work every day. I have a friend with six kids & they have to do this because that's just the time & economics story for their family - feeding 8 people for every meal, every day, takes a lot of time & effort! Where it gets easier is when you use a "once a whatever" cooking approach:
- Once a Month cooking is really popular for people who don't like to cook at all. You go shopping on say a Saturday, and then cook or meal-prep all day Sunday, depending on what your cooking approach is. Some people do "dump meals", which is where you fill a Ziploc bag with food & then dump it in your crockpot or Instant Pot. Some people do a lot of casseroles & freeze them. Lots of options.
- Once a Week cooking is where you go shopping & then cook & prepare your food for the coming week. This is one of the most popular methods with bodybuilders because it's not as much work as the monthly meal-prep approach, but then you're all set for the week & don't have to worry about it.
- Once a Day cooking is not the same as cooking every meal. You cook separately for meal-prep than for dinner each day. It's basically like a daily workout program, except for cooking. It operates off the principle of "compounding interest is the most powerful thing in the universe." So you just set aside some time each day to cook, and you pre-plan what day you will cook which foods & buy your groceries ahead of time. Let's say you make half a dozen meal-prep items for each batch. So you may use the Instant Pot on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for chicken teriyaki, crack chicken, and chicken chili verde. Then you may make energy bites on Thursday & homemade granola bars on Friday. By the end of the month (30 days), at 6 servings per batch, you'll now have 180 servings in your fridge, freezer, and pantry...a huge variety, all with very little work each day! Plus, knowing what we know about cooking, there's only assembly/cutting/stirring/cooking involved as far as the processes go, so each recipe is totally doable!
Personally, I tend to like OADC because I can make a lot of "heat & eat" options, as well as a lot of "assembly" options, so I can just throw stuff together. Plus, all of my recipes have the macros for the batch & per serving listed (more on that later), so it really just boils down to playing Food Tetris...what are you macros, what do you have available, and what are you going to pick from your readily-available options to meet your macros for the day? Waaaaaaay easier than having to figure out the math for every single meal & having to cook every single meal from scratch! Plus with OADC, the work of cooking simply becomes another chore, like cleaning your toilet:
- You've already decided what to make each day & have the recipe (checklist) for each item
- You've already gone shopping for the ingredients
- You've already set an alarm to trigger you into make it
- You're only making one thing at a time, so it's not overwhelming or difficult at all
Seventh: How do you want to manage your food storage?
Outside of the work of cooking, meal-prep is really a question of two things:
- Storage
- Transportation
So, where are you going to put all the food, and how are you going to take it with you, if you leave for work or school or whatever during the day? Storage-wise, I typically recommend investing in a spare freezer, which will allow you to do things like take advantage of sales & bulk discounts, and also have a massive supply of assembled foods and heat & eat meals. But it really all depends on your personal approach to meal-prep:
- Some people just do a week's worth of meals & store them all in their fridge
- Some people do a mix of freezer/fridge
- Some people do more with dry storage (pasta, ramen, etc.)
Container-wise, you have couple options:
- Disposable (recyclable) containers
- Permanent reusable containers (metal or glass or thick plastic)
If you do weekly meal-prep, then a good set of dishwasher-safe containers is a really good investment. But food-storage isn't the only storage situation to think about - there's also how you want to transport your food! If you work from home or are a homemaker or whatever, then you're all set. If you're on the road, then you'll need an insulated lunchbox that will fit your meal-prep containers, for however many you need to take for the day (ex. lunch & snacks). Buttoning these systems down (storage & transportation) will allow you to live & work effectively within those systems. Also, this is a bit vague, so we'll cover the equipment in the next section!
Eighth: How do you want to implement the cooking & storage processes?
This is the equipment portion of the discussion: what tools are you going to use? If you just play on living off a liquid meal replacement like Soylent forever, then you just need a cabinet. If you want to cook real food, then you'll need a pantry, fridge, and freezer. One question here is: would you like to make cooking faster, more automated, easier, and with more consistent results? In that case, there are a variety of tools available, such as the Instant Pot & Sous Vide systems. I have a good introduction on efficiency tools that will help free up your time & save you money here:
Storage-wise, Most apartments will fit a
7cf chest freezer, and if you have the space, I'd recommend going with a
20cf upright freezer (~$5/mo to operate). My upright deep-freezer has saved me so much money over the past couple of years that I'm saving up for a second unit to divide up my raw & assembled foods and my meal-prep container meals. Note that you don't have to buy all of this, or any of this, and especially, you don't have to buy it all at once! I allocate a monthly budget for kitchen stuff & then just save up for stuff. If you're an ATOT baller, then by all means get a walk-in fridge & freezer installed with an apartment-sized pantry, haha!
As far as lunchboxes go (if you're on the go), Igloo makes a
nice large insulated lunchbox for $25. I have a special lunchbox made by
Isolator Fitness, which is $99 - pricey, but includes a lifetime warranty, is designed for meal-prep containers, and includes slim ice packs for the insulated interior, plus has a space for utensils, a notebook, water bottles, etc. If you're on-the-go, I have a good post here on mobile options:
If you plan on doing a lot of "heat & eat" meals, then I recommend investing in a good inverter microwave with a reheat sensor:
If you want to get reusable containers, check out manufacturers like
GlassLock. If you want to cook in bulk & use disposable containers, check out Web Restaurant, where you can get a variety of shapes & sizes, such as this
30-ounce 2-compartment container with lid, sold in a 150-pack for $40 + shipping. There are a variety of ways to approach meal-prepping; if you like to do the "heat & eat" thing, having access to a lot of containers is super helpful because you can support your workflow of cooking in bulk easily. If you like to more liquidy stuff like broth, soup, and chili, check out this post:
The answers to these questions depends on the answers to the earlier questions about how you want to approach meal-prep (OADC/OAWC/OAMC/from-scratch-daily/etc.) & how you want to approach the cooking process (scratch, assembly, heat & eat). Mine changes from week to week & month to month, depending on what I want to cook for the coming week.
So we have answered the following questions at this point:
- How many people are you feeding?
- How often do you like to eat?
- Do you have any food restrictions?
- What is your preferred way of eating?
- What are your food quality requirements?
- How often do you want to have to cook?
- How do you want to manage your food storage?
- How do you want to implement the cooking & storage processes?
The whole point of all of this is to shine a light on your situation in order to make you aware of things, and then actually create a system that will support you in your meal-prep goals. Reading & knowing about something is entirely different from actually setting it up & then doing the work required to make it happen. Really, all you have to do is pick from the options above & then use a meal-planning checklist to get rolling, which boils down to setting some alarms, going shopping, and choosing the recipes ahead of time so that you can be successful on a daily basis. Again, don't forget the "mojo" thing - all we are doing here is (1) losing weight, by (2) eating according to our macros, which we do by (3) setting up a meal-prep system, which is going to save you money, time, effort, and headaches, and get you looking good, feeling good, and being healthy!
So really, at this point, the recipes aren't even a discussion point - that's a conversation we're going to have during our meal-planning phase. For the setup portion above, we're really more concerned about creating a blueprint to work off. A lot of people jump into the story right in the middle - "does anyone have any good meal-prep recipes?" - which is simply the incorrect starting point. ALL recipes are macro-friendly! It's simply a matter of calculating the macros for each recipe & splitting it into serving sizes (there are online calculators for that). So the point really isn't to change what you love to eat, it's just to tweak your intake numbers of protein, carbs, and fat in order to meet your weight-loss goals. The idea here is to basically setup a system in the vein of shooting fish in a barrel...you can't miss, because you know
exactly what you are doing & how you are doing it! So now we have our blueprint - but how do we make it happen?
Implementing a meal-planning system:
Again, this all looks really wordy, because typing stuff out that could be said verbally in conversation creates pages & pages of text, but just keep your mojo here & bear in mind it's all really,
really easy, lol. And despite the wall of text, I prefer it to be written, because then you can review it & go back & look at it & think about it & chip away on it, instead of having to rewind a video over & over again. So, what is required for a meal-planning system?
- Your favorite recipes with macros attached
- A weekly meeting to select your menu for the upcoming week, which includes planning out the schedule for what you're going to cook & when you're going to cook it
- A grocery-shopping trip to get all of the supplies that you need
- Doing the work of cooking, as reminded
Building up your personal recipe library:
Everyone has their own tastes preferences based on what they like, what they grew up with, etc. That's why short-term diets don't work (you just go back to what you were eating before) & why purchased meal-plans don't work long-term...we like to eat what we like to eat, you know? With macros, you're acknowledging that your body, from a high-level, blends up whatever you eat, funnels out the protein, carbs, and fats, and spits out the rest as waste. Again, it's not a free pass to eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but you can level-up from the idea that certain foods are "good" or "bad" for you...there are plenty of 90-year-olds who eat bacon every day & still survive somehow. So this section really boils down to just two questions:
- What do you want to eat?
- How do you want to store your macros-enabled recipes?
Let's talk about storage first. I just dump them into a folder on my Google Drive. Virtual PDF printers are free, so you can snag any webpage out there instantly & easily. I usually snag a copy of a recipe & then make my own in Word or Google Docs, which includes the macros. There are plenty of ways to figure out the macros; here's a good free calculator:
You basically just need a place to dump recipes & then create your own version with macros. I also like using Google Drive because then I can pull it up on my phone/tablet/laptop in my kitchen to use, or print it out if needed. So how do you figure out what you want to eat? This is a process that takes time to collect your favorite recipes, family recipes, new recipes, etc. This is a process that I call Grit. Grit means two things:
- Being willing to tinker & experiment until you get the results you want, instead of hitting a "didn't work" barrier & quitting.
- Being willing to be persistent & stick with things until you obtain success
With cooking, many times you'll goof up a recipe, or it won't come out quite as you imagined it, which usually just means that you need to tweak it until you perfect it for YOUR tastebuds. This is where most people throw their hands up in the air & quit and either say "this recipe stinks!" or "I can't cook!" But we know from our cooking process that cooking is just four things (assembly/stirring/cutting/cooking), so it's just a set of very easy skills that any kid can learn (go watch MasterChef Junior sometime, lol), and we know that the Grit process says we need to tinker until we get what we want, and stick with that approach until we get the results we want. Thanks to the Internet, there are virtually infinite sources of recipes:
- Facebook groups
- Reddit subs
- Youtube channels
- Food bloggers
- Manufacturer & product recipe blogs
- Google searches
- Pinterest
- Cookbooks
- Family members (ex. Grandma's famous whatever recipe)
Also, if you like trying out new foods, you have an infinite playbox to enjoy for the rest of your life. We have over one million documented unique recipes in the world, which is literally more food than you can eat for the rest of your life. Plus, modern grocery stores have over 42,000 products on average, so there's no shortage of variety or availability, thanks in part to both refrigeration & international shipping. You can literally eat better than a king because of this - you can eat strawberries in winter for a modest price increase over summer berries, which never in the history of mankind has been available!
I typically try one new recipe a week (minimum). If you eat 3 meals a day, then over 7 days, that's 21 meals per week, so trying just one new recipe isn't so bad, from that perspective! And again with the power of compounding interest, if you follow that very simple meal-planning integration methodology, then you'll have tried 50+ new recipes every year & will have found a variety of new ones to add to your permanent recipe collection! I'm also a really big fan of what I call
Master Systems, which is where you pick a topic, like say breakfast bagels, and then create a little flowchart plan for creating a variety within it. So like with breakfast bagels, you can do eggs, egg whites, spam, bacon, sausage, pepper-jack cheese, provolone cheese, etc. Here's a post with a sample picture, then scroll down for the flowchart system:
Or energy bites, which is kind of like a cookie-dough version of granola bars - scroll down & see the third post here:
Again, a lot of this depends on how much you care about food. I get sick of eating the same thing all the time, so I like to have variety. I also like great food & rich food, so if i'm going to bother to cook, it better be good so that I don't cave & get a Whopper or some take-out pizza. So your job here is really to build up a foundation of recipes that you can choose from; we'll talk about why that's important in a minute.
Weekly meal-planning session:
Our overall goal is to get the mental mush of cooking off your brain. We know that cooking is easy - it's just assembly by hand, cutting & chopping, and cooking. Recipes & workflows are just written or mental workflows, which require a checklist, tools, and supplies. In order to offload the requirement of storing all of these questions & answers from your brain, we need to have a regularly-scheduled meal-planning session. I recommend weekly, with your family. The way you do this is simple:
- Use a "Look Book" (a dedicated 3-ring notebook, with dividers for lunch, dinner, etc., with photos & names of your meals) to select recipes; you can also hop online to find a new recipe or three to try out this week
- Use a form (one for each eating session) to fill out what you want for the next 7 days, which helps you decide what day you want to eat each meal (note: it's flexible...if you don't feel like Taco Tuesdays, then you can make something else on your week's list instead!).
- Now that you have your plan, it's time to convert it into a schedule. For each food item, ask yourself if it's going to be heat & eat, assembly, or cooked from scratch. Once that is decided, then stick it on your calendar at a specific time & day.
- The last step is to generate a grocery shopping list. Because I have all of my recipes in Google Doc form, I just copy & paste the ingredients into one master list, then print it out, cross off what I have in my kitchen storage already, and now I literally have a printed list of exactly what I need to buy for the week during my next grocery-shopping trip.
So for every recipe, I make sure that I have a picture - either one off the original recipe, or a photo of the meal I take myself. This is one of the setup projects with my meal-prep approach: buying a 3-ring notebook, some clear page protectors, and some yellow page dividers with tabs. Split up your notebook according to your eating schedule. So if you like 6 meals a day, you would have 6 dividers:
- Breakfast
- Morning snack (savory)
- Lunch
- Afternoon snack (sweet)
- Dinner
- Dessert
As you write out your recipes, figure out the macros for them, and save them to your storage location like Google Drive, you print out a picture with the name of the recipe, and stick it in the appropriate slot in your notebook. Over time, you'll build up a pretty good variety of recipes to pull from - now you have options! And you can integration lots of fun things into you weekly meal-planning form - something like Plated or Blue Apron or Hello Fresh, or going out to a restaurant, or getting Uber Eats delivery, or drinking the new chocolate-mint Soylent that just came out, or whatever! Rather than being restrictive, this approach enables you to not only be 100% successful at meal-prepping, and if you so choose, your macros, but also enables you to provide yourself with wonderful food for every meal, and to avoid the question of what's for dinner or having to figure out what to eat every day - you already know what you're gonna eat, and it's gonna be frickin' awesome! lol.
With this setup, meal-planning becomes as simple as going through the McDonalds drive-through...nice, big pictures of your favorite meals, along with a selection form to plan out when you want each food item, for each time slot you want to eat in. Most people use what I call the "fireworks" approach - you get a burst of motivation & make two dozen cookies tonight. But that doesn't solve the remaining 20 meal slots you need for the week, haha! This approach takes all of the headache away & amps up the results - cheap, delicious homemade food, that gets you in-shape because you're eating according to your macros, and depending on how you set it up, very easy work because of great modern appliances that help you get consistent, reliable results. This is why I'm such a big advocate of stuff like the Instant Pot & Sous Vide - you have to eat pretty much every day for the rest of your life, and through your choices, you can either do it amateur-hour or you can go full-mega-pro with my meal-prep approach & get awesome results physically & food/meal-wise!
Going grocery shopping:
The easiest way is just to stop by the store & get what you need off your pre-defined list. I can be in & out of an uncrowded store in ten minutes flat & get all of my food for the week in no time. I walk up & down every aisle so I don't miss anything, starting on one end of the store to the other, following my list, then check out, and boom - DONE! Of course, there are a variety of options available:
- Buying from a grocery store
- Grocery-store curbside delivery service
- Grocery store truck delivery service
- Bulk stores (Costco, Sam's, BJ's)
- Local farms
- Local mom & pop shops
Like, I have a customer at work who is next to a dairy farm, and the milk is so good that I pretty much buy all of my milk there every week. I typically buy my rice from Asian or Indian food stores, because they sell 20 & 25-pound sacks of Jasmine, basmati, and sushi rice for cheap. Anyway, the point here is that grocery shopping goes from a chore to just a stupid-easy task that you have to burn through, because of the almighty Shopping List.
Actually doing the cooking:
So this entire post kind of funnels down to this point: cook the food! To recap:
- Your calendar alarm goes off - time to cook Chicken Teriyaki in the Instant Pot!
- You have the recipe in your Google Drive, so you pull it up on your phone
- You already went grocery shopping, so you have all of the ingredients you need
- You use the magic cooking formula (assembly + cutting + stirring + cooking) to generate whatever dish you're working on
- You split it up among your meal-prep containers & throw those in the fridge or freezer after they cool off
That's part of the reason I like once-a-day-cooking...I don't have to do massive hours of hands-on cooking, I can just focus on one thing at a time, that I've already figured out when to make, that I already have the ingredients for. It's like shooting fish in a barrel! This is the vision & gloriousness of meal-prepping...IT MAKES LIFE SO DANG EASY!
Let's get our Mojo back:
So really, the actual point is to have food in front of you when you're ready to eat. Food that tastes amazing. Food that meets your macros. Food that you decided on ahead of time. Food that you already went grocery-shopping for. Food that you already defined the macros for. Your job, then is simply to eat as reminded! I carry around a big lunchbox all day, full of delicious food, which saves me money, helps me stay in-shape, gives me lots of energy, and removes all of the headaches associated with meal-planning & cooking. And nothing is hard or difficult in this system! No headaches! Every piece is separate & easy! So to recap:
- We want to do meal-prep
- In order to lose weight & stay in-shape long-term
- By using IIFYM to eat the foods we love & have food ready to go for us, for every meal, every day
It can be extremely difficult to reach this point mentally, because everyone has these internal mental barriers that go up when you talk about having to do work...but as you can see, it's really not that bad! It's really just filling out a checklist to define what you want, then setting things up, and then doing the jobs of planning out your weekly menu, going shopping, cooking when reminded, and eating when reminded. On a quick tangent, exercise is like the
least efficient way to lose weight...running one mile burns about 100 calories, so a 26-mile marathon only burns 2,600 calories. A 3-point loaded Bloomin' Onion from Outback Steakhouse is over 3,000 calories. So you could run a whole marathon, scarf down a plate of Bloomin' Onions, and still gain weight. it's insane, but that's how it works!
So, where do you go from here? How do you make it work? How do you make it happen, instead of just liking the idea? For starters, walk through the checklist & define what you want, then get things setup, then get things rolling! This doesn't cover every single topic related to meal-prep, but it gives a pretty good outline for what you need to do & to help you clarify things & gain the confidence that it really is not only doable, but also pretty easy! So either respond to this post, or feel free to PM me if you want some help!