Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click through a link and make a purchase, it will earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you! See our disclaimer for details.
How to Successfully Meal Prep as a Beginner
We’re glad you’re interested in learning how to meal prep for weight loss!
However, before you start, it is important to consider why you’re making this change.
Maybe it is because you’ve heard meal prepping helps you save money. Maybe it is because it’ll help you eat healthier. Or, maybe you’re trying to eat out less.
In this article, you’ll find:
- 5 tips to consider when meal prepping
- The simple steps to start meal prepping
- Idea of containers to use, common prepped foods, and apps to help you along the way
#1. Track Your Current Spending
If you’re interested in meal prepping for the sole reason of saving money, we suggest not going in and cutting your “normal eating” cold turkey.
Like any new habit, it takes time, and you don’t want to burn out! With meal prepping, you may get excited for a week or two, then give in after a few bowls of Chipotle.
The first step of meal prepping for beginners is to realize how much you spend both on groceries and on eating out.
If you are notorious for eating out often, you’ll be amazed at how much you can save!
Eating out (especially if you add drinks to the tab) can add up. That $10 doesn’t seem like much, but once you eat out 5 times per week, that mere $10 adds to $200 a month! If you were to take that $200 for 1 year, you could save $2,400!
What could you do with $2400? Pay off a credit card? Save up for a vacation? The possibilities are endless.
So, your first step is to look back at your expenses.
Be sure to check out my favorite app to track my spending and budgeting!
Some tips to realize how much you spend:
- Track your spending for 1 month on an app or on paper!
- Learn about how much your spouse/family spend on eating out. This includes drinks, lunches, and everything from smoothies to doughnuts, to breakfast burritos. Learn their eating habits!
- Take notice of how much food you let get thrown away due to not getting eaten. Meal prepping helps prevent you buying food you don’t need!
#2. You Don’t Have to Know How to Cook
The best part about meal prepping is that it isn’t hard!
You’ll see in the next section that there are so many free resources to learn how to meal prep, and how to do it easily.
For now, as a beginner, think about what you currently like to eat. Considering you may be eating the same lunch for a few days of the week means you have to know what you may enjoy.
As in, do you occasionally like chicken, and really enjoy ground beef? Do you enjoy sautéed veggies but not cold vegetables?
There are many similarities with meal prepping recipes. A few popular meal prepping ingredients include:
- Chicken, whether frozen or shredded
- Taco bowl ingredients, including: corn, beans, cheese
- Cooked vegetables, including: asparagus, broccoli, zucchini, and carrots
- Salads
Before researching ways to meal prep, and seeing extravagant meals made by chefs, it is important to realize what will be realistic for you and your family!
#3. Know Your Resources
The ultimate resource for meal prepping for weight loss is through Pinterest!
I even have a Pinterest board dedicated to cheap meals and meal prepping!
There are plenty of other free options to get ideas, from blogs, to websites, to ebooks.
Some suggestions:
- Create a Pinterest board and categorize different meal prepping ideas. You could make sub-boards for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks!
- Find blogs that focus on cheap recipes! Remember that cheap doesn’t automatically mean unhealthy. You can absolutely eat healthy meals without spending a fortune. It is great to find other people who are doing it successfully, and follow in their footsteps!
#4. Buy Meal Prepping Materials
You don’t need expensive containers to properly meal prep. Don’t get tricked into thinking you need a special set of containers. Anything works.
Do realize that you’ll end up freezing some of your meals/snacks that you have planned to eat more than about 3 days. As long as your container can handle being microwaved and frozen, you’ll be good to go!
Some of our favorites are the glass containers, since they have the best chance to lasting the longest. They are very durable. This is an example of glass meal prepping container.
There are tons of containers that you can use. Here are a handful of popular options, in different sizes.
If you plan on having a balanced meal every lunch/dinner, then the divided containers may be best to separate your main dish to your sides or vegetables.
Otherwise, you might end up piling everything ontop of eachother.
5 Steps for Beginners to Start Meal Prepping!
The following 5 steps will get any beginner who wants to meal prep ready for weight loss and saving money!
- Do Your Research
- Get Your Supplies
- Practice With One Meal a Week
- Transition to Breakfast and Snacks
- Work Up to Meal Prepping All of Your Meals
Step 1. Get Ready to Start
After reading through the above information, you’ll be a step ahead of where you started.
First, go through Pinterest/blogs and find a handful of recipies or foods that you would be happy with making and eating.
Second, decide if you will only prep for dinners, or your kid’s lunches. You could also just prep for snacks. Whatever is your situation, decide now what you want to try!
(We suggest not jumping into prepping for each meal right away. Learn what works first, how much it takes, and what everyone enjoys eating. You’ll also discover what foods freeze well, and which don’t last long.)
Step 2. Get Your Supplies
Quick shipping is helpful if you have Prime, so you could get started with all your containers in a matter of 2 days or less, and by saving money.
Otherwise, go to the store and pick up some meal prep containers! You may have to search a few stores for the specific containers you want, and for a reasonable price. For example, divided containers may be a challenge to find at some smaller stores.
If you are a big soup maker (an awesome option for freezing meals!), soup containers are great to pick up.
Step 3. Experiment with one meal for the week
Unless you have plenty of cooking experience under your belt, it may be pretty difficult to estimate how many days’ worth of meals you’ll get out of a recipe.
If you are like any other American, we don’t appropriately look at serving size charts.
It will take a few practices, but that’s why it’d be good to start with prepping your lunches, or dinners. Or, start with the kid’s lunches.
Starting with one week’s meal will help you plan for prepping more!
Step 4. Add in breakfast or snacks
If you really are interested in losing weight or saving cash, meal prepping your snacks can save you tons!
How often are you hungry and decide to eat a full bag of chips?
By meal prepping your snacks, you can have ziplocked bags, or small containers with healthy foods you enjoy, and not have to risk overeating junk food when you’re craving food in the middle of the day!
Some easy meal prepping snack ideas:
- Peanuts or other nuts, dried berries/fruits, or trail mix
- Peanut butter and crackers/veggies
- Grapes, cubed cheese
- Veggies and ranch
The idea of those suggestions are to show that you don’t have to cook everything you meal prep! Large containers of snacks at wholesale stores come in handy for these!
Step 5. Work up to prepping all your meals
This isn’t for the faint of heart. Meal prepping all your meals takes tons of planning, and can be even harder if you have a large family.
Imagine having your breakfast, lunch, and dinner planned and ready to be heated up and eaten. You’ll save time, save money, and save being stressed out over meals.
You can always plan to have a free day, or to not prep on weekends. Remember, everyone’s situation is different!
Let’s Summarize!
- If you have any desire to save money, save time, and eat healthier, meal prepping is for you! Start off slow and learn what will work best for you or your family!
- There are a ton of blogs, websites, ebooks, and other resources available for free to check out. Meal prepping does not have to be difficult or require tons of cooking experience.
- Meal prepping should be exciting! You get the opportunity to eat a delicious meal instead of a cheap frozen meal from the store. Plus, you will save tons of money over the month (or year!). Try out meal prepping today!