4 Secret Tips For Speeding Up Your Meal Preparation

Feel like meal preparation each week takes forever? If you’re working hard to ensure that you can stick with your diet plan, one thing that you need to be doing is planning and preparing your meals in advance.

Those who take the time to do this are going to be far more successful with their approach than those who simply ‘wing it’ as they go.

You need to plan. Plan to succeed and you will.

So this said, meal prep may be dragging you down. If you devote most of your Sunday afternoon to meal prep, you might be wondering if there’s anything you could be doing differently to get the process moving along.

Fortunately, there is.

Let’s go over four secret tips that you can use to help speed up meal preparation.

Buy Pre-Chopped Vegetables

First, you’ll want to consider buying vegetables that have been already chopped and ready to go. Likewise, rather than having to prepare your own salad, you might instead buy one already bagged.

While you will pay a premium for this, if it means the difference between you sticking with your diet or not, it’s worth it.

As chopping vegetables tends to rank high on the list of things most people would rather not do, this one can definitely save you much time.

Pre-Cook In The Microwave

Another smart move is pre-cooking some of your food in the microwave. For instance, if you are going to grill chicken, you might microwave it for 2-3 minutes first and then put it on the grill to finish it off.

Or, if you’re baking potatoes, popping them into the microwave for a couple minutes can significantly reduce the baking time needed. All of this speeds up the entire process without really having to sacrifice all that much on taste.

Multi-Task

It’s also a smart move to begin multi-tasking as best as possible. For instance, you might get the brown rice cooking and while that finishes, start grilling your meat.

The more things that you can do simultaneously, the faster the entire process will go. Obviously you do need to be reasonable with this however. Get too many things going at once and you might just have a kitchen fire joining the party.

Cook Large

Finally, the last step in reducing your overall cooking time is to focus, as much as possible, on cooking in bulk. This means rather than cooking 3 chicken breasts, you cook 10.

Rather than making a pot of stew big enough to feed your family, make one large enough to provide 3-4 meals of left overs. By cooking in bulk, you can reduce your total cooking time over the span of time.

It makes no sense to cook the same meal multiple times a week when for a few extra minutes, you could cook multiple servings all in one go.

As most food freezes very readily, you also should have no problem making sure that you can store it until consumption.

So there you have a few quick words of advice when it comes to preparing your meals for the week. The more actively you put forth the effort to plan, the better you will find you can stay the course on your diet.

Just remember that you should also always have smart go-to options for when your planning fails. These are healthy meal and snack ideas that you can cook in five minutes or less so that when time is tight, it doesn’t mean resorting to unhealthy food choices you shouldn’t be eating.