.png)
Part 3 of 3 - My Top 15 Meal Prep Tips: A Complete Beginner’s Guide to a Healthy Family Meal Prep
Part 3 of 3
Today we’re closing out the 3 part series on “My Top 15 Meal Prep Tips for Beginners” with the final 5 tips. I hope you’ve found these tips helpful and Pin or bookmark them for reference later on!
If you need some recipe inspiration to get you started, check out my FREE 7 DAY MEAL PLAN to help jumpstart your planning and prepping. Subscribe and have the plan sent straight to your inbox.
Alright, let’s dive into the last 5 tips…
Tip #11 - Have a way to save all your recipes and keep track of your favorite meals!
Once you make meal prepping a habit, inevitably you’re going to add more recipes to your arsenal…which is great! But this means you need a way to keep track of what you liked, didn’t like and all the new ones you want to try.
This could mean you like to print out copies and keep them all in a folder, or take screenshots of recipes and save them to an album on your phone. Do whatever works for you!
Another fun and easy way to organize your recipes and house them in one spot is by creating Pinterest boards to organize your recipes. You can divide them up into seasonal categories or by different types of food (soups, appetizers, casseroles, etc.). Check out my Pinterest Account and follow along for some inspiration on organization and to find new recipes, which brings us to the next tip…
Tip #12 - Switch up your recipes and don’t get in a recipe rut
We all have our favorite, tried and true recipes - and that’s great! You want to have recipes you can fall back on no matter what. But after a while, making the same couple recipes will get boring and may discourage you from continuing with the meal prep.
For my own meal prep variety, I try to make at least one new recipe each time I meal prep. This allows for some variation without overwhelming my time commitment.
So start that Pinterest account, like I mentioned in the previous tip, and scroll through my boards and others for some new recipe inspo!
Tip #13 - Have fun!!
Meal prepping goes so much faster and is more enjoyable if you HAVE FUN! This will look different for everyone but some ways I make it more fun is by enlisting the help of family, playing some fun music while I’m prepping, having a glass of wine while we prep, and sharing about my awesome meal prep on social media when it’s done.
Personally, I think meal prepping with others is the number one way to make it more fun and it will also help you finish more quickly. Sometimes my family and I will get together and have a meal prep party on Sundays! Everyone makes 2-3 recipes but with enough portions for all those involved. For example, if we’re all making 2 recipes and there are 4 of us there, then we all go home with 8 different meals!
Tip #14 - Be consistent - make it a habit!
The best way to see success from meal prepping is to make it a habit. That’s the only way any new change can have a long-term effect on your life. Obviously life will always happen and we might have plans, or someone gets sick, or we just don’t have time - and that’s ok! We just make a plan for the next weekend and get shopping!
I’ve gotten into the routine of doubling many of my meal prep recipes. So if I make a double batch of breakfast cookies, I can put half in the fridge and half in the freezer. This means I will have more to pull out if I don’t get to make breakfast or a snack the next weekend.
Tip #15 - Get help!
Don’t do it all yourself! Ask your partner, kids, family, friends, etc. to start meal prepping with you. We’re social creatures and therefore, much more likely to maintain a new routine if we have others participating with us. It also holds us accountable to our new change.
Having help means you’re not doing it all alone and it also makes it more fun! (See Tip 13!)
And if you need help with meal planning, well that’s right up my alley! Check out my $27 e-book, The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Meal Prepping: How to set yourself up for a chaos-free week of Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. This guide will give you 4 weeks of meal plans geared towards meal prepping. It also includes all 15 of these meal prep tips, along with a step-by-step guide to help you plan your meal prep session. Save yourself the trouble of starting from scratch and use my guide to help jumpstart your meal prepping journey!
Ok, that’s it - my top 15 meal prep tips to get you started. I hope you found them helpful! I encourage you to Pin or bookmark this post so you can refer back to it as you start your meal prep journey. Also, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this post where I break down the other 10 tips.
Happy Meal Prepping!
Wishing you health and wellness,
Ashley