Today I want to emphasize the The Importance of Meal Prep! If you want to maintain and promote your own healthy lifestyle, you MUST prepare yourself in every way possible!

My Beachbody coach loves to say all the time....

FAIL TO PREPARE AND YOU PREPARE TO FAIL!

Of course, this is super applicable to life, but my favorite way to apply that statement is to your nutrition! So today, I want to focus on meal prep! Last Sunday and again this weekend, I will be doing some serious meal prep, because it's just the ONLY way to really guarantee myself success in my nutrition by making all my snacks, meals, etc. accessible, easy, and a of course healthy! This is especially true when I'm doing 21 day fix! If you're going to be successful on this program - you NEED TO PLAN AHEAD!!!

So here's an idea of what my meal prep looks like!

Saturday - Recipe selection and grocery shopping. I will usually go on pinterest or online and hunt for recipes, OR I will go to my already absurd amount of collected recipes and choose from some of my favorites, like Paleo Phad Thai and these other 21 Day Fix Approved options.
Sunday - MEAL PREP DAY! Last weekend was a great example! Instead of vegging out all day watching football, which is how I wanted to spend my Sunday, I multi-tasked! I put football on in the background and got all my meal prepping and house work done in the meantime!

But now you might be asking - okay I understand planning ahead but what exactly do you do to prepare yourself?

Basically - I prepare absolutely everything I can ahead of time! So, first things first, I CHOP EVERYTHING UP!!!!

One of the ways I get my greens in during 21 day fix is by eating cucumbers (which I LOVE) and celery with hummus as snacks!  So, to make it as easy as possible for me to do this (which after all is the point of meal-prepping), I chop and bag EVERYTHING ahead of time!  I cut cucumbers up and celery up into small pieces and measure them out using the 21 day fix green container. Once I fill the green container, I dumb those pre-cut, pre-portioned cucumbers or celery into a ziploc bag and continue until I have cut up all the celery and cucumbers! What I'm left with is a tupperware full of pre-portioned, ready snacks that I can just GRAB in the morning to take with me to work.

This same strategy is used in my preparation of my fruit and greens! For example here, I had a cantaloupe that I wanted to use for my 21 day fix purples! So I chopped it up and kept it ready in a tupperware for the week! I could have pre-portioned these out just like I did for the cucumbers/celery but I ran out of ziploc bags! So, I just left these in the larger tupperware and filled a purple 21 day fix container before I left to go to work in the morning.

For my greens, I love to have a salad for lunch! I get creative with my salads! Kale with sweet potato and hard boiled egg/chicken with a lemon olive oil dressing, kale with grapes and almonds and lemon olive oil vinaigrette or balsamic vinegar or lemon! Yum! But the biggest reason I can do that is there's no need for me to rip up greens in the morning because I've already done that on Sunday! I rip up and throw all of my kale into a very larger tupperware container! I then throw a larger handful into a tupperware for lunch that day and top it with whatever ingredients I'm feeling for that days salads!

I also prepare all my protein ahead of time! I hard boil all my eggs (as shown below) and cook all my protein! This week it was chicken! I cooked about a pound and a half of chicken breast tenders (which I love because about 2 of them are equivalent to one 21 day fix red container), which I seasoned with whatever seasoning I was feeling that day! Coffee BBQ seasoning, cajun, italian seasonings, etc. It kind of depends on what I'm going to put the chicken in that week! This week was taco salads and taco bowls, so I seasoning them with a chili powder, Mexican blend!  That way your protein is ready to just throw into your meal or eat as a snack, with NO PREP NEEDED!!!

Also not pictured - I prepped and baked sweet potatoes as one of my starches for the week and also soaked and cooked a bunch of beans as my other starch, both of which I threw onto salads or into taco bowls during the week!

And that's it! It was a tedious task, but you know what? If you take a couple hours on a Sunday morning/afternoon while you're watching football or doing house chores, etc. you will save yourself SO MUCH TIME during the week and make eating health SO MUCH EASIER!!

I highly recommend meal prepping and I hope that some of these tips helped you with your own meal prepping adventures!!!

Until next time, stay healthy my busy friends! ;-)