Meal Prep Benefits: 10 Reasons Why It’s Good for Your Health and Wallet

Meal preparation (or prep) means to devote a block of time to batch-cook ingredients.

It includes a plan of complete meals for the week ahead to make it easier every day to feed yourself and your family.

It can be as simple as chopping a bunch of salad veggies. Sometimes, stirring a sauce for the week together is involved in preparing and portioning complete recipes.

Meal planning should make it easier to feed yourself and your mates.

It gives you a weekly head start and allows you to feel more in control of what you eat. And even help you achieve your fitness goals.

In this post, you’ll find the best reasons and benefits of meal prep. Let’s dive in!

1. Helps develop healthy dietary behavior

Involving children during meal preparation is one of the good approaches in the development of healthy dietary patterns. 

When you help during meal preparation, your dietary choices and quality improves a lot. Recognizing the advantage of meal preparation contributes to improving nutrition. 

Meal preparation tells children among numerous choices which one is a healthier choice for them.  

This increases their self-efficacy of choosing healthy food, food preferences, food preparation skills, and consumption of healthy foods.

This prevents obesity, malnutrition, and improves nutrition among children and adolescents.

2. Can improve vegetable intake

Many of us are aware that children don’t like to consume vegetables. Studies show the involvement of children in meal preparation, helps in modifying this behavior. 

This may urge them to eat healthily and increases their vegetable consumption.

Parents tell their children about portion sizes of food during food preparation, which is one of the positive approaches for children.

Encouraging the child in food preparation helps in having balanced meals and vegetable intake of children. This would be a valuable intervention approach to improve diet.

3. Is therapy for brain injury

Meal preparation test is often done for the treatment of the adults having a brain injury. This is done to check the dependency of the client where the condition lies. 

It shows whether he/she is partially independent or independent of others. It is also done to check patient cognitive-perceptual skills.

Meal preparation is done as occupational therapy. The therapist accesses the person making all meals are more responsible and less burden to caregivers. 

Therapists use meal preparation protocol to increase client independence with poor cognitive-perceptual skills.

4. Helps improve blood glucose level and blood pressure

Meal preparation training helps individuals having diabetes, body weight maintenance, and blood pressure. 

Preparing a meal for themselves gives knowledge of accurate portion sizes and a sense for adapting healthier choices. 

This program engages patients in physical activity habits that are glycemia reductions and regulate blood pressure.

5. Has psychological benefits 

Meal preparation helps in improving psychological health.

It enhances food vocabulary, healthy food choices, sense of sharing, sense of responsibility, and demonstration of positive values. 

But that’s not all. Meal prep helps in avoiding high-risk behavior like depression, violence, anxiety, and binge eating. It also gives pleasing family times and values.

6. Helps you save time

For busy people, meal prepping is great. It’ll be non-negotiable until you get the gist of it. 

This easy task will help you cut down on kitchen time. You will feel prepared and ready for another clean eating day. 

Also, don’t be afraid to fill your oven at once with various kinds of foods.

7. Helps you save money

Think again, for those who think that eating healthy is way too costly. Meal prepping will save you cash as you can buy bulk goods and take advantage of your freezer. 

Think large in terms of volume when you set aside time for preparing your meals.

Don’t be afraid to buy five pounds instead of one pound of chicken.

If you want to, you can cook one pound at a time and freeze the rest so that it will still be able to defrost.

8. Helps you learn to portion control

You should consider calories in versus calories out when working on weight loss or muscle gain.

It’s a healthy way to know what you’re eating when you prepare your meals in advance. You will get an insight into what a real portion of food is by cooking your meals.

As we all know, most of the time, you get a much greater portion of the food in restaurants, including ‘organic ones. 

You would be less likely to overeat by paying attention to your food while cooking. This is one of my favorite benefits of meal prep.

9. Makes grocery shopping enjoyable

Make sure you have a list before going to the store. 

Categories of labels: vegetables, fruits, proteins, frozen foods, dairy products, grains, and fats. In every group, You must aim to include at least one new food a week. 

If you purchased salmon last week, for instance, try another fish, such as haddock or swordfish.

There are multiple nutritional components in all foods. Your list should vary so that your body does not get too used to one way of eating. 

Having a list prevents the purchasing of sugary, processed food that you do not need.

10. It’s not all or nothing

Remember that you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen for meal prep to happen or get all the benefits.

Focus on one thing at a time, and nail it before overwhelming yourself with everything all at once.

If you want to ensure that your breakfast is a priority, focus on prepping some breakfast items such as egg cups, oats, or a pre-made protein shake. 

Have vegetables pre-washed and cut and the same goes for fruit. Start small. 

Once you master one small task, you will feel confident in moving on to prepping meals for an entire day.

Takeaway

Meal prep is a technique that makes it easier during the week to eat balanced, home-cooked meals. It takes only 30 minutes or less to make these simple, safe meal-prep recipes. 

That’s what meal-prep is about: quickly and efficiently preparing balanced meals. That way, when you are, they’re ready.

There are plenty of other meal prep benefits. Once you will start preparation for your meals, you will feel a positive change in your life.