Pre-cooking food - is preparation really everything?
If you follow our blog diligently, you should know by now: A healthy diet is not only important for sports enthusiasts, but for everyone. But how do you make sure that you really only consume healthy food? The answer is as simple as it is disappointing - cook it yourself (right?). If you have a job, exercise regularly, and have a thriving social life, cooking every day isn't easy. Meal preparation is a measure that is very popular and widespread, especially among strength athletes and bodybuilders . Because they pre-cook food, they certainly have healthy alternatives available in stressful everyday life and when travelling. We have dealt with the question of how practical pre-cooking food really is for everyday use.
Why should I pre-cook my food?
We have already mentioned one reason why many athletes and nutrition-conscious people cook food in advance. This way you can be sure that you are eating really healthy food with every meal. Even with supposedly healthy dishes in restaurants, you can never be sure whether some greasy butter or flavor enhancers were secretly added. Especially if you want to lose weight or build muscle, a strict control of calories as well as macro and micronutrients is expedient. This is exactly where the Meal Prep supports you. As soon as you don't prepare your food yourself, you give up this control, at least to a certain extent. Another argument for pre-cooking is obvious: it is incredibly efficient. All you have to do is devote time to meal prep once every few days to prepare the planned meals. For example, the following procedure is popular: On Sundays, when you tend to have many hours of free time, you cook the food for the entire work week and create a meal prep weekly plan. So while you sacrifice a few hours of Holy Sunday, you don't have to worry about preparing food until the following weekend. Another advantage here is that you can shop on Saturdays, for example, and use the groceries fresh the next day. For many, Sunday meal prepping is a soothing ritual that they no longer want to do without. So if pre-cooking food has so many benefits, why aren't more people doing it?
Recipes to pre-cook - what do I want on Wednesday?
A frequently cited argument against pre-cooking is the fact that on the day you take it, you may not feel like eating the pre-cooked meal at all. How am I supposed to know on Sunday what I want to do on Wednesday? This reasoning, while partially understandable, has a major logical gap. Even if you don't pre-cook food once a week, you probably only go shopping 1-2 times a week. Even when shopping, you have to look into the future and think about what you could feel like doing in the next few days. Another charge meal prep skeptics like to articulate is lack of variety. In fact, bodybuilders and competitive athletes in particular eat a comparatively monotonous diet. For them, the function of effective food intake is in the foreground, taste and variety are often neglected. It is particularly efficient to prepare as many dishes as possible from as few ingredients as possible. For example, potatoes or rice are alternately combined with different types of meat and various vegetables. However, that doesn't mean that pre-cooking food has to be boring. There are many dishes to pre-cook, you are almost completely flexible here. Because the food is frozen after preparation or at least stored in the refrigerator, it is well preserved. Only ingredients that perish very quickly, such as seafood or whey products, are not optimal for meal prepping because they are also not well suited for freezing.
Meal Prep Recipes
There are countless recipes for preparing a wide variety of dishes on the Internet. It is important to think about what kind of dishes you want to create beforehand, as not all foods can be kept in the refrigerator for a long time or frozen well. A prep meal classic is undoubtedly chilli con carne. Here are a few tips for further recipes for pre-cooking:
- Overnight Oats
- chicken curry
- Asian stir fry
- Vegetable pan with minced meat
- Budda Bowls
- Chickpea salad
- and much more
Our ready-to-serve meals are essentially dishes to be pre-cooked
Let's recap. Important arguments for pre-cooking food are efficiency and targeted control of your own diet. Flexibility can be a factor that tends to discourage people from pre-cooking food. So how cool would it be if there was an alternative that had the advantages mentioned and didn't have the disadvantages? You're lucky because there are. Our ready -to-serve meals are essentially dishes to be pre-cooked. You can heat these up in the microwave or in a saucepan in minutes and enjoy. There is definitely no faster way to prepare a pre-cooked meal! Our product range includes many delicious and healthy dishes that you are guaranteed not to get bored with. For athletes and professionals, but of course everyone else, dishes like our Chili con Carne (Chipotle Chili) combine healthy ingredients with efficiency. We want to enable you to remain flexible with our dishes and to achieve your nutritional goals. Luckily, however, pre-cooking and ready-to-eat meals are not mutually exclusive options. We are convinced of the mentioned advantages of Meal Prep - for weeks when there is no time to look for recipes and pre-cook them even on Sundays, our healthy ready meals are the perfect alternative.