Today we are going to talk about healthy school lunches and why they are essential for teachers too. That means everybody’s favourite two words… MEAL PREP!



We are going to talk about the five things that make meal prep vital for teachers.

Convenience

Control your portion size

Willpower

Make a few easy choices

Saving money

Convenience

First of all, were going to talk about convenience. Teaching is a time poor profession, that’s the bottom line. There’s yard duty meetings lessons, planning, grading, and assessing. To be able to come home and have a healthy meal planned for you is a very underrated thing. Making it one less thing to worry about when trying to maintain a healthy eating habit. Planning meals also leads to be able to properly size your potrions, which is often forgotten about

Portion control

When wanting to maintain a healthy eating habit, portion control is often forgotten about. When cooking every day, it is not something we usually do. Controlling your portion size is key and it is a shock to the system when you actually measure your portions for the first time. “Really, I was eating this much”. It is a great thing to be able to organise your portion sizes at the start of the week. You can have all of your portions measured and raady to go before you head to school on a Monday morning.

Healthy school lunches save your precious willpower

Despite what people say, will power is not some infinite resource you can tap into. Willpower is like a battery and we continuously use it as the day goes on. That is why it is so much easier to fall ‘off the wagon’ later in the evening. It is also why I am a firm believer in morning exercise (but that is another story). Anyway, by pre-making your meals you can save that valuable willpower for other things.

Make a few, early easy choices

If we are cooking every breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the work week, that is fifteen different meals we need to decide on. Fifteen different decisions on what to cook.

Pre-cooking all of our meals limits the decisions we make to one. What we decide on cooking at the start of the week. Every decision is a variable, and limiting the variables is usually a sure fire way to be consistent.

Save money

Maybe the most significant value to meal prep is the one for the hip pocket. By planning your meals, you can buy your food in bulk and save dollars at the checkout (not to mention anybody who buys from the school canteen).

When meal-prepping, you can easily feed yourself for under half of the cost of buying different things every day.

Some people may not want to eat the same thing every day, which is fine. Personally, I can eat the same meals every day, and it is okay. However, if you would rather some variety to your meals, there are plenty of ways to still meal prep. Pre-cooking your proteins is a time saver that can have your meals packing a delicious punch in no time. If that isn’t your style, cook even more servings (say, ten instead of seven), and freeze what you don’t use. After a few weeks, you will have a variety of frozen meals pre-cooked and ready to go.

So everybody, make sure you start your meal prep this week!

Need more ideas on being a healthier teacher? Click here for more info.