I’m trying to lose a lot weight and gets some rigidness to my form. I got the gym stuff worked out, but the diet stuff seems so hard to figure out in my case.
I live with quite a lot of people at the moment, and a couple of us want to start going to the gym and eating healthy. But I think creating lots of food for everyone is important. I really don’t know how it’s possible to meal prep for all of us, for both lunch and dinner. Also I feel like variety is important. I don’t want to eat grilled chicken breast with rice every single lunch and dinner while still reaching my protein goals. But spending the time to create unique food every other day is too much. What do all of you do/did to lose weight and get in shape? Is it normal to have the same food every day?
Do I only meal prep lunch? Is it every single day, or only a certain number of days a week? I’m a rookie here. I need pointers. I feel like I’m overthinking this.
You don’t need to eat the same food every day. What some people do is prep a bunch of different freezer/fridge meals, and then you can take out a different bag/meal and cook that whenever you’re ready. If you’re comfortable enough with a hotpot or an oven, this is probably the easier method to prep for a large number of people, there’s a bunch of recipes you can google where you just toss the contents in and heat it up until cooked. (Microwave works too, but it’s usually better for smaller portions, not feeding large number of people).
What some others do is to prep over a few weeks, for eg today they cook a large batch of lasagna and put it in the freezer. Next couple of days they cook a large number of pies. Now they have both pies and lasagna in their freezer and can rotate between the two. After that another dish, and another. This works better if you have large kitchen and lots of freezer space since you’ll end up with a lot of frozen food. Don’t forget to write the dates on each batch and rotate them so they get eaten in time.
Or alternatively, you could prep some things that can be combined differently. For eg cooked chicken can be added to salads at the beginning of the week, or add bread and make sandwiches for the middle of the week, and then you can add them to rice, or noodle + soup base at the end of the week.
A same but different way is mealprep a bunch of side dishes, if you look up bento side dishes some of them are relatively easier to prep. Your main may be the same but at least the side dishes make it feel like a different meal each time.
I can’t really advise on the type of meals you should prep. If this is your first time, you may want to go slow. Stick to simpler recipes, and start prepping just one meal a day. You can expand to more meals once you get the hang of things. Better than prepping 15 meals and then tossing out most of them if you find you can’t eat them for whatever reason.