We here at team Lock&Lock could write a whole book on why everyone should get into cooking, either for themselves or for their families. From being a time-tested token of love to being a surefire way of changing your diet, cooking good food is an art that can bring pure joy and fulfillment to the chef and their lucky loved ones.

But let’s face it, cooking is hard, not only as a skill to be mastered, but also as logistical task. If you’ve ever had to come home, expecting some rest and relaxation, only to realize, “OMG, I need to start cooking the ulam for the night”, then you know cooking is a chore.

As enjoyable as it is to express your creativity through food, there are times when the thought of it can bring out a sigh from the best of chefs. There’s just so much to do before the cooking gets started and more effort to clean up afterwards. And when it becomes too hard, you can’t help but just resign yourself to another take out from your favorite fast food restaurant.

To those who have ever wanted to reduce the hassle of cooking, you should try your hand at the art of “meal prep”.

 

What is “Meal Prep”?

Meal prep, or meal preparation, is the practice of making batches of meals ahead of time. Think of it as making baon for all the meals you want for the rest of the week. These meals, which range from fresh salads to grilled chicken, are then stored in the fridge and can be taken out whenever you want.

Whether you’re a young professional, the designated family chef, or an aspiring health nut, meal prep might be a good practice for you to adopt to make healthy eating cheaper and more convenient.

 

Save yourself time and effort

Every cooking session has a preparation phase and a cleanup phase. The preparation phase includes tasks like assembling the pots and pans needed, defrosting the meat, and washing the vegetables. There’s so much to be done before the fire is even started. The cleanup phase, on the other hand, is where the pots and pans are scrubbed clean, the counters are wiped, and everything else is placed back to where they are supposed to be.

Though I’m sure that there are some people who love moving stuff around and cleaning up, these tasks are, to our team, the most boring part of any cooking session. They can take such a long time and leave us tired and cranky afterwards.

Doing all the cooking for the whole week in one go can reduce the number of sessions you’ll have to hold and, by extension, minimize the number of times you have to prepare and clean up. Watch as you gain freedom from the mind-numbing chores and start looking forward to your chef-time!

 

Take control of your diet

Practicing meal prep can help you take charge of your diet by ensuring you have a convenient healthy meal next to you. Every productivity guru knows that good habits are the keystone to living your life well, and it is the system that ensures that a good habit actually sticks! It is rare for anybody to change through sheer will power alone.

That’s not to say that it’s all doom and gloom for us regular Juans and Marias. Rather, it calls for us to tweak the systems in our lives to achieve the lifestyles we want. Design your life such that doing the right thing becomes easier.

Very often, we give in to take outs and give up on healthy eating when there are no good options around us. Keeping your diet just becomes too hard when there are no salad bars or whole foods near your workplace.

The solution to this is not to beat yourself up, but to make it easier for you to stick to your diet. Having a specially made Paleo-diet approved baon in your bag can definitely sway you to eat it. It gives a convenient healthy option for you to take, lessening the influence of convenience stores and restaurants on your choices. After all, your baon is just right there!

A bonus psychological benefit is that committing to preparing your meals beforehand can make you more deliberate and mindful of your food. By drafting a meal plan at the start of the week, you are forced to think of what should actually go into your body. If you are on a budget or on a diet, you would definitely take that into consideration as you choose your meals. Remember the old saying, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail! And this applies to your health and wallet.

 

Wrapping it up

We hope we have convinced you to try out meal prepping! Meal prepping is one of the key habits that has brought many benefits to our team members, and we hope that by sharing our thoughts on it, we can spread our good vibes. There are many resources out there that can get you started on meal prepping, but our team will be putting out some of our experiences on meal prepping in this site in the near future. Stay tuned!