How to meal prep according to registered dieticians

Published on 30th March, 2022 at 10:20 am

When time is short and you’re in a creative slump, but still want to enjoy a healthy meal, meal prepping is the answer. Two dieticians walk us through how to get it right.

Why meal prepping?

How often do you catch yourself peering into the fridge or kitchen cupboard at the end of your workday, only to realise you have nothing to cook for supper? Then, without any semblance of a shopping list, hop into the car, race to the supermarket and fill your trolley with enough goods just to cover you for that night’s meal? What about your lunchtime routine – do you tend to buy a costly takeaway lunch because there was no time to make one at home ahead of your workday?

This can all be avoided by being intentional about planning the week’s meals and preventing the mad 5pm or lunch-hour dash. In a nutshell, meal prepping involves not only planning your meals ahead of the week, but taking steps before it’s even begun to prepare meals and shorten the time needed in the evenings to actually get supper on the table, or the next day’s lunch in your bag. That means no frantic grocery shopping, no overspending, and no food wastage, either.

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“Meal prepping is a practice I recommend to my clients,” says Rhodene Leydekkers, a registered dietician at En Bonne Santé Dieticians. “It saves a lot of time, which makes mealtimes less overwhelming. It also helps you to manage portion sizes, and makes healthy eating a bit easier.” Plus, if you have certain wellness goals, meal prepping is a reliable tool to help you reach certain milestones, says Monique Piderit, a registered dietician at Nutritional Solutions.

Meal prep tip #1: Get the right ingredients

In the world of meal prepping, some ingredients trump others for convenience of preparing in advance.

Meal prep champion ingredients

Grains & pulses

Cook your starches in bulk ahead of the week so you have a healthy option at the ready whenever you need it. Leydekkers recommends brown rice, quinoa, wholewheat couscous and/or wholewheat pasta.

You can also bulk up and boost the nutritional content of your week’s meals by cooking a batch of beans or lentils to be added to stews and soups.

Top tip: you can even meal prep your breakfast. The answer? Overnight oats! Combine rolled oats, grated apple, milk and cinnamon and sprinkle with nutrient-packed chia seeds, sunflower seeds and berries. Refrigerate overnight in a jar and wake up to a wholesome, filling breakfast ready to eat! Alternatively, you could boil some eggs before the week has begun and include one or two as part of your breakfast each morning as a protein-packed way to start your day.

Meat & poultry

“Grill six to eight chicken breasts ahead of the week and use them in a chicken salad, chicken wrap, or chopped and added to a veggie soup,” says Piderit.

The same goes for other meat, like beef mince: it can be made into a savoury sauce for pasta and used in cottage pie or baked jacket potatoes later in the week.

Vegetables

This is an easy win in the meal prep game. “Cut up fresh vegetables like carrots, celery, bell peppers and butternut [to use in various dishes throughout the week],” says Leydekkers. Or, if you know you’ll be preparing, say, a steak or roast chicken later in the week, you could roast your veggies in advance so that all you need to focus on come the day is getting a perfectly flavourful cut of meat on your plate.

Healthy eating doesn’t have to stop over the holidays. Piderit shares her holiday healthy-eating tips here.

Avoid these

Some ingredients may keep their nutritional content while being refrigerated or frozen, but lose their texture or flavour. That doesn’t mean you should force your way through eating them just to stay healthy and to keep things convenient. “If you know that there are specific meals you don’t enjoy as leftovers, don’t meal prep these as leftovers,” says Leydekkers.

Here are some ingredients and meals to either avoid meal prepping, or to meal prep in a smart way so you can still enjoy them:

• Salads with dressing: prep your salad ahead of time, but pack the dressing separately so it doesn’t have hours to soak into your veggies, making them soggy.
• Fruits that brown: any fruit that goes brown quite quickly once sliced – apples, pears, avocados, bananas – can be saved for the day you’re going to eat them so you can enjoy them at their optimum texture and appearance.
• Crispy foods, like deep-fried pastries or crumbed chicken, fish or shellfish naturally lose their crispiness after exposure to cooler or more humid environments. You can save these for preparation on the day you’ll eat them.

If you’re a parent with fussy kids, you know the struggle of getting them to eat a balanced meal. Here, Leydekkers shares her tips for keeping even the fussiest kids happy and healthy.

Meal prep tip #2: Strike the right balance

Both dieticians recommend portioning for balance on your plate by breaking it up as follows:

• ½ plate salad or vegetables
• ¼ plate lean protein (skinless chicken, fish, low-fat meat, egg, legumes)
• ¼ plate high-fibre starch (think brown rice; wholewheat pasta, bread or couscous; barley; quinoa; bulgur wheat; sweet potato)

“You could also include some fats that usually come from using a little bit of oil in preparing the meal, or by adding fats to a meal, like avocado, nuts or seeds,” says Leydekkers.

Meal prep tip #3: Follow these steps

Step #1: Plan the week ahead

Sit down and plot out the meals you’d like to make, suggests Piderit. Spot opportunities where you can use the same pre-cooked ingredients on more than one night. “Examples can be cooking one or two different high-fibre starches like brown rice and barley, or sweet potato and quinoa to keep in the fridge, and cutting up veggies to cook during the week,” adds Leydekkers. Piderit adds that if you notice an overlap of ingredients like carrots (chopped in a stew, grated into a savoury mince dish) take advantage of this.

Step #2: Do the shop

You won’t only be shopping for ingredients, but for containers to store all your pre-cooked or pre-prepared food in, too. “Microwave- and freezer-safe airtight containers in different shapes and sizes are a convenient way to store your food, and keep the fridge and freezer organised,” says Leydekkers. Try your best to get all the cooking ingredients during one trip so you spend less time in the aisles and more time in your kitchen.

Step #3: Get prepping!

Not everyone follows the standard Monday-to-Friday nine-to-five work week, so decide on the day or evening that would be most convenient for you to set aside two to three hours of your time for cooking. “You can prep more than one meal at the same time to save time,” says Piderit.

Meal prep tip #4: Store correctly

You’ll find a storage system that works for your household, but small steps like labelling your containers and Ziplock bags with the food they contain and the date you prepared them will help make meal prepping work for you. “Refrigerated meals should be eaten within three to four days, and freezer meals within three to six months,” says Leydekkers.

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