As a dietitian and a mother of two boys, I’m going to speak the truth here and tell you that meal prepping is one of the most daunting tasks I deal with weekly. Sometimes I just don’t want to be thinking so much about food, meal ideas, schedules, and everyone’s opinions or preferences.
Often, the biggest problem is getting started because planning a week of meals takes a long time, partly because there are 21 meals to consider.
As Daisy Howling explained in the Harvard Business Review: “What presents as a straightforward, practical problem — meal prep — is a psychological, emotional, and even physical one, too, and it hits working parents when we’re the most vulnerable.”
The first step is to dedicate 20 to 30 minutes every week as a starting point to understand your weekly schedule better, for where meal prepping will make actual sense. Between kids’ sports, social events, work, and obligations, you’ll realize that there are probably only a handful of dinners every week that require planning!
Here are some easy tips to help you get started with meal prepping.
- Pick themed nights, such as Taco Tuesday, pizza Fridays, meatless Mondays, or Stir Fry days.
- Pick 2-3 proteins to focus on — and plan the cuisine around the proteins.
- Pick your busiest, most stressful nights and start by planning meals for those nights.
- Create a freezer stock of easy-to-thaw items as often as possible, such as muffins for breakfast, homemade sauces, or batch-cooked dishes like chicken cutlets, homemade burgers, and ground meat.
- Divide and conquer. If you have a partner in parenting, consider dividing the days (i.e., one person takes Mondays and Wednesdays, and the other takes Tuesdays and Thursdays) and save eating out for Fridays! This has the benefit of spreading the work equitably, and you always know who is responsible on which nights. There is no ambiguity!
- Take shortcuts when you can because meal planning doesn’t need to be harder than it already is! Use leftovers or create weekly rotations.
- Try making your own concept. Whether it’s making your own pizza and everyone gets to pick their toppings or creating your own bowl and everyone gets to put what they want into the bowl, this will help kids with autonomy.
As an ongoing project, I love saving or bookmarking any bloggers, websites, or Instagram posts of recipes that seem appealing to me. Recipes that are worth trying or that could feed into a weekly rotation require a more permanent folder in your mind. I find this very motivating and inspiring because it’s less daunting to go back to this folder when you’re stuck on an idea versus searching through the web from scratch.
Just remember, if you’re unable to make it work out one day or three days, ordering take-out, grabbing a frozen food option, or breakfast for dinner are excellent back-up ideas!
