Would you like to eat everyday tasty, whole food meals without having to spend every minute of your precious down time? Keep reading, we might have a solution for you.

The last couple of weeks were really hectic for us. As we mentioned in our previous post, my mom was in hospital for some examinations and her stay prolonged for more than three weeks. So, we became machines: working till 5 PM, getting home, eating, working out, preparing food for tomorrow, sleeping. And, yes, going to hospital. We are not a kind of people who can go on with that kind of schedule for a long time, so stress and extreme tiredness were swooping upon us.

Realizing that cooking and food preparation was taking more time than we can afford, some changes had to be made. We’ve found a great video of food prepping for a whole work week and thought to ourselves: “This is it!”

So, the first challenge is to think what you will prepare. There are many things to consider:

– Having in mind that you carefully plan your meals so that they have all the nutrition you need

– Try to imagine eating that food for 5 (or whatever) days. It should be something that you like. I mean, REALLY like, so you don’t get sick of it 🙂

– Planning to buy and prepare enough food. If you never cooked in bulk before, it could be a real challenge to figure out how much food do you actually need. But don’t fret, it is a trial and error, but next time you’ll get better at estimating how much of the ingredients you actually need. If you buy more than you need (and here I’m talking about grains, oats or beans) you can use them for the next week or even a week after that. Buying less can only mean that you can add some extra salad or quick prepared ingredient to say, Thursday or Friday meals.

First things first: the breakfast. Here it goes: in food processor ground oats and nuts of your choice (walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, peanuts, cashews, etc.), add cocoa or carob powder, sweetener of your choice (in our case, stevia), a dash of Himalayan salt for some energy boost. You can also add some protein powder, maca powder, coconut flakes, chia seed, hemp seed… Go crazy! You can make this dry mixture for the entire week and in the morning just heat up some non-dairy milk and mix it up. We also add one chopped banana to each bowl and some goji berries (you can try with some other fresh, dry or frozen fruit). For some extra fullness, add a spoon or two of coconut oil. Breakfast done!

Next in line is what to eat while at work. Personally, I eat two meals, first some fresh carrots and cabbage salad with tofu dressing, but never mind me, I’m an eating machine 🙂 Beside that, we prepared flat bread with corn grits, soy flour, carrots, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds and spices (black pepper, cayenne pepper, curry, caraway, salt). We will eat this through the entire next week at work with either soy yogurt or tomato juice.

When we come back from work, we like to snack something before our workout, so we always have in store peanuts, dried figs, dried apricots and brazillian nuts, for that selenium intake.

And last, but not the least, for this week we prepared lentils with cauliflower and pumpkin seeds, with millet, red peppers and onion. We will eat this after our evening workout with some beet salad, green olives or roman lettuce with scallions.

We packed everything in plastic containers and put it in either fridge or freezer. If you are worried about reheating the food (as we are) and thus loosing more of its nutrients, you can do as we do: use as much of ingredients in raw form as you possibly can. It is as much tasty as the cooked one. Of course, the quickest way to heat up the food would be microwave, but we suggest to stay away from those, as they change molecular structure of food, making it completely unusable in a sense of nutrients.

That’s it. This is the second Sunday we spent preparing food for the next week, and trust me, a few hours spent in kitchen for freedom and more spare time on weekdays is so much worthy!

If you struggle with preparing food, especially during the weekdays, maybe you should consider the meal prepping, as a way to save you time and that precious energy during the working week. If you carefully plan and prepare healthy food for a week, you are also lessening the chance of munching some fast food and unhealthy snacks. Hope this post helps and happy meal prep!