Yay! I am so excited!
Welcome to the beginning to my new blog segment Meal Prep Sunday.
Every Friday, I'll be sharing with you your meal prep plan for the following week and walking you through every step you need to take to get your healthy and tasty meals ready.
I've created this because I know and really understand how busy you are.
You want to eat healthy and nourish your body but with the craziness of life it's easy to make good food and cooking your last priority.
But I'm on a mission to help you live a healthy and balanced lifestyle through meal prep plans that FIT into your life! No matter how little time you have.
All I need from you is 2- 3 hours on a Sunday for some meal prepping fun!
Put on your favourite music so you can dance along or even have a podcast or movie playing to help the time fly by.
These few hours are going to save you a lot of time, stress, energy and hunger pains through out the rest of the week.
In your rush to work, you'll simply be able to grab you breakfast, lunch and snacks from the fridge before heading out the door, and at night time, the only cooking you'll be doing is reheating your tasty preprepared healthy dinner - oven or microwave, whatever your preference.
How easy is that???
Let's get started!
Meal Prep Guidelines
Each Meal Prep Sunday Plan contains one daily plan, which you can use from Monday to Wednesday or full the whole week. It's completely up to you.
For each recipe I provide, you'll need to work out how many serves you need. This is determined by how many days you follow the plan and also how many people are following the plan along with you. For instance, if you and you're partner (2 people) decided to follow the plan from Monday to Wednesday (3 days), you would need to make 6 servings of each recipe.
To be clear, each plan isn't a diet or weight loss plan but a guide to easily incorporate balanced and healthy eating into your life. However, because each plan is packed with goodness you may notice a change in your energy, overall wellbeing and potentially your weight over time depending on you normal eating routine.
If there's a recipe you don't like then simply swap it out for one of my many others. Simply look for recipes that you can easily batch cook, keep in the fridge and reheat if you need.
This Week's Meal Prep Plan:
Breakfast: Vanilla and Berry Overnight Oats
Snack 1: Carrot Sticks (1-2 Carrots) and Hummus (2-3 Tbsp)
Lunch: Chilli Lime Chicken
Snack 2: Peanut Butter Protein Balls
Dinner: Beef and Black Bean Stir Fry
Meal Prep Method:
1. Work out how many days and how people are following the plan so you know how many serves you need to make of each recipe.
2. Go through each recipe and construct your shopping list for the week. What's great about meal prepping is you don't need a million different ingredients because you're making the same meals.
3. Go food shopping!
4. Once you're home, make sure you're kitchen is clear and ready for cooking, and then get out all the ingredients and containers you need. This is also the time you can put on some music, a podcast or a movie - or maybe you just want silence - whatever you need to enjoy the next couple hours.
5. Start by marinating your chicken for your Chilli Lime Chicken (Steps 2 and 3). Once that's done put it aside along with the rest of the recipe, we'll come back to that later.
6. Let's make your breakfast. My tip is to make each serving of your Vanilla and Berry Overnight Oats in their individual containers so it's all ready to go. Follow the process of adding oats to each container, then the chia seeds to each container and so on - that way you're not going back and forth between each ingredient. Once you're done put the containers in the fridge.
7. Next we're going to focus on your snacks. With the carrots and hummus, you may want to just take a bag of carrots and a container of hummus and put them in the fridge at work (if you have one) - this way you can chop up the carrot and grab the hummus as you need it. Otherwise, cut up all the carrots you need and then seperate each serving into a container before adding the hummus to one side of the each container.
8. Now it's time to make some Peanut Butter Protein Balls! Once you're done either seperate the protein balls into individual servings with seperate containers or put them in one bigger container that you can put in the fridge at work and grab as you need.
9. With all the super quick and easy stuff out of the way, it's time to cook your main meals. We're going to cook your dinner first because this Beef and Black Bean Stir Fry is also really quick and easy to make. Once you're finished cooking you can either seperate each serving into individual containers or keep all the stir fry in one container and all the rice in another - whichever suits you. To keep things extra fresh you can also keep a few portions in the fridge and then just defrost when you need them.
10. By now your chicken for your Chilli Lime Chicken should have been marinating for 1 to 1 1/2 hours! And by the time you finish chopping your broccoli and steaming your sweet potato, it will be all ready to go. Follow steps 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7 to finish off the recipe and then seperate each serving into individual servings.
11. Clean up and then put your feet up! AMAZING job! You just smashed Meal Prep Sunday and now all your food is ready to go, which means no more food shopping, cooking or cleaning for the next few days.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and what you would like to see more in Meal Prep Sunday. I LOVE LOVE LOVE hearing your feedback! Be sure to also share your creations with me on Instagram so I can like, comment and share! Use the tag @leahitsines and hashtag #leahitsines to reach out.
Leah x
