5 Meal Prep Tips For The New Year!
Are you looking for ways to make your New Year's resolutions easier and healthier?
You're in the right spot.
Today we're going to talk about the five meal prep tips for the new year.
Did you know that the overwhelming majority of New Year's resolutions are around some form of health?
It's true. About 80% of New Year's resolutions are related to some way of impacting our health, whether it be food or sleep or exercise, you name it, it can be on the list and I want to make it easier for you in the new year.
Hi, I'm Jessie Gutsue. I'm a registered dietitian with Oswald Digestive Clinic, and we are here today to talk about five meal prep tips for the new year.
If you're interested in more gut healthy cooking tips, then check out the link here for Five Tips For Quicker Gut Healthy Cooking. Okay, let's get on to these top tips.
[Video Transcript Below Video - it is the same information]
Tip #1: Start with a Plan
So number one, I know it's boring, but start with a plan. It's sort of like when somebody tells you, eat your fruits and vegetables. It's like in one ear out the other. Not exciting, but absolutely necessary. You've never done anything well without a plan. And this plan can be very rigid per se, to very loose. It can look very different for everybody.
It can look different for the person with a bunch of kids living in the city to a bunch of kids living in the country, to no kids at all living in the city. You see where I'm going with this? It will look different for everybody. And so you really have to look and assess your life and say, is this realistic? For example, say you're planning on making a lasagna for Monday. If you've ever made lasagna from scratch, it takes a minute, okay?
And Monday, oh, by the way, Monday you have conferences and then your kid plays ice hockey, and then you have to go to run by church afterward to grab something. So likely lasagna isn't going to work for Monday. So you need to be realistic. And when you look at creating a plan, make sure you put your life in all of its dos in that plan.
For us, it's a loose outline. Say Monday is meatless. Monday, Tuesday might be like a white meat. Wednesday might be casserole night. Thursday is an easy egg dish. You see where I'm going with this? But you have a loose outline so that it doesn't take a bunch of mental energy to come up with different things every single week. It can be the same thing every week if you want, although I would find that very boring. But if you want to make it sort of a looser idea, but with some parameters.
So meatless Monday within that category, there are endless of options. Tuesday, the Turkey or the chicken or where I'm going with this, and then is it a casserole or a side protein or is it mixed into a pasta dish? You name it. But it makes your planning easier when you have some form of parameters around it. And this goes with breakfast and lunches as well.
I'm using dinner as an example because that tends to be where most of us get stuck. And then in addition to that plan, be realistic again with how many meals you're going to make. For us, I usually pick four solid recipes for the week. And you may say, well, four, what do you do? The other three nights? Just wait. Okay, so I pick four meals for the week. They could be anything. And then on the final third days, I will usually add in an easy egg dish, a leftover.
I'll have something like, say I made some sort of casserole that we have plenty of for a second night that's a leftover. And then one night a week we usually have a takeout or go out or have some activity that takes up our meal for the evening. So that's how I do it.
It's not planning seven meals for the week and then feeling exhausted by Tuesday because that's not realistic and that's not helpful. You want to make sure that whatever you're setting yourself up for you can actually implement and feel successful because that's really where the help comes in because once you get the momentum and feel how easy it is to meal plan and prep, you keep on going with it. And that helps with keeping you healthy through the new year.
Tip #2: Prep Ingredients, Not Whole Meals
If you've ever prepped a meal ahead of time. Sometimes they're great like soups, they totally lend themselves to prepping ahead of time, but a lot of foods tend to be better cooked or made the day of. You can absolutely prep ahead of time.
So for this one, say you're making a meal on Monday and you've got a little downtime, most often there are moments where you have a minute to do another task while something else is cooking. So say you have all of your cutting board and knives are all out, and all you need to do is pull out the veggies for tomorrow and wash them and cut them into whatever way they should be, cut and then store them for tomorrow.
That makes it really easy to sort of prep ahead and maybe Tuesday's a really busy evening for you. So it works out perfect to have a couple ingredients prepped ahead. So all I'm doing is cleaning up. Usually I don't peel my carrots, but these are a little bit on the rough looking side, and so I will peel off the really bad spots.
And meanwhile, maybe my rice is cooking in the background or I've got the oven on for today's meal, which is like a sheet pan meal. So you see where I'm going with this. You're already in the kitchen and tomorrow I'm doing roasted veggies on a sheet pan too, because that's my favorite. So I'm going to chop these into bite-sized pieces and toss them into our container.
Now, you might be prepping more than this, but for example's sake, now I'm putting 'em in my container and I'm ready to go for tomorrow. All I have to do is pull out whatever ingredients go along with this. And that leads me to my third tip, and that is use smart storage. So you may have heard the risks of plastic, and they're true, you do with higher acidic foods and hotter foods. Studies do show that some of that plastic can leach into our food, and that is not something that we want for our overall health in our New Year's revolutions.
So it may feel daunting and overwhelming. So start slow, slowly, get rid of your plastic items and invest in a set of good glass containers. This helps on a couple different levels. Number one, like I mentioned to the health of it. Also, when you store your food in dark containers or wrapped in tinfoil, you don't know what's in them. This I clearly see I have carrots, so I love to store my food in glass so that they can be heated in the same container, stored in the same container. I can clearly see what it is. There's lots of benefits to glass.
Tip #3: Use Smart Storage
And then my favorite tip, and if this tells you anything about me, well let it be. Okay. I love these containers. They are great for putting all of your ingredients for a particular meal in one spot so that you know exactly where they are and you pull it out when the time comes.
So say tomorrow you're going to have carrots. Well, you put your dish in there, maybe a couple of acorn squash and maybe a lemon. So you've got your ingredients in here. You'll have a couple other components you can hold out on. You don't have to add salt or the pepper or the oils. Those can stay on the shelf wherever they live. But for the ingredients that you know need for the meal, put 'em in this container, easy to see through. And then right on it, we're going to have this dish for Wednesday.
So I've written on there Wednesday, everything's packed up nicely, and then I just add this container to my fridge and I pull it out whenever the day comes and all of my ingredients are there. This helps to limit maybe other family members from eating the food that you've purchased for that particular meal.
Maybe the stress of, oh my gosh, what did I do with that ingredient? Or I forgot something. Because it always reminds you when you pack this after, do your grocery shopping, you don't lose anything, and you realize that maybe you've forgotten something so you can plan on a sub ahead of time. One of my favorite tips.
Tip #4: Batch Cooking with Purpose
And then the fourth tip is batch cooking with a purpose. Okay, so a really good example of this is like when you're making a lot of meatballs. Meatballs are a little tedious, if I can be honest, or burgers or things like that, that really lend themselves to buying double or even triple the amount that you need. You've got a big mess started already. Go ahead and prep all of them, put 'em in the freezer date and label and put 'em in good containers so that they stay fresh and then pull 'em out when need be.
And then all you have to do is add to it whatever sides, and your main component is already done for you.
Tip #5: Make It Flavorful and Seasonal
And my fifth and final tip is making it flavorful and seasonal. I think this is where it really adds into the fun aspect of meal planning and prepping, because eating seasonably really helps to keep diversity in the diet. And if we know anything about gut health, we know that plant diversity is king. The more diverse our fruits and vegetables and plants and nuts and seeds and all of that are in our diet, the more diverse our microbiome is.
And we know study after study concludes that the more diverse of the probiotics or those gut bugs that we have in our gut, the healthier we are eating seasonally, really lends itself to doing such. Because then you're not monotonously eating the same food day after day, week after week, but you look at a calendar in whatever region you live in, and you say, what is in season now, it's not only helps with making foods fresher and therefore healthier because they retain more nutrients because they're likely traveling from a shorter distance, but it also helps with the fun and versatility of meal planning and prepping.
So there's lots of benefits that go along with this one. And knowing and understanding your spices and herbs really get creative. I mean, you can have a dish, basic old baked chicken and put a combination of spices on it one day and a completely different combination of spices on it another day and a sauce, and completely change the dish.
Let me show you one of my favorite quick and easy sauces. This is a tahini sauce. I am just eyeballing this because I'm going to show you just how easy it is. A few tablespoons of tahini, a couple tablespoons of lemon juice. Of course, you can use fresh lemon, but I'm going to just show you how quick this is. A tablespoon or so of maple syrup, a pinch of salt.
We are going to crush a garlic clove, whisk it all up. Once those components are combined, you're going to then drizzle in and continually stir the olive oil in. I put a few tablespoons in and mix, mix, mix, and you have one of my favorites dressings. It's really, really versatile. Oh my gosh. Oh gosh, that's so good.
Okay, so there you have it. Spices, sauces, herbs, all the things can really make your cooking come to life and make you excited about cooking and meal planning and prepping.
So I hope you found those five meal plan tips really helpful. I want to know which tip you are going to implement this coming New year because it really will help you feel better and eat better and get more excited about food.
If you're interested in cooking demos like this one for your favorite people or your friends or your coworkers, then
Email us at cookingdemos@oswalddigestiveclinic.com
Where you can inquire about more topics that we've done in the past or just get to know what we can offer.
Again, my name is Jessie Gutsue and I'm functional medicine dietitian with Oswald Digestive Clinic, and I am so happy that you are here with us today.
Happy New Year.
Or you can just start by downloading our FREE GUIDE: 5 Tips For Faster, Gut-Healthy Meals!
