Eating unhealthy food can often be a sin of convenience. It’s something that we are tempted to do on a busy day when the drive through is faster than healthier options. It’s something that we are tempted to do when frozen meals are so much easier than cooking from scratch, especially if you live alone.

This is very unfortunate, however, since cooking from scratch always has the potential to be much healthier than eating out or eating out of a box. In this post I'll talk about how you can get the most nutritious meals in the least amount of time by preparing your meals ahead of time so you have them when you need them.

Quick, Hot Breakfasts

Breakfast is one of the hardest meals to make ahead of time, especially if you are watching your carbs. This is because carbs store and keep the best. For example, milk with cereal is a classic, quick breakfast. With the right cereal, it can be very filling and very nutritious, but it’s also going to be high in carbs. The same can be said for pancakes, and with syrup, hooo boy!

To plan breakfast without the carbs, make a deconstructed omelet the night before, and put it together in the morning. Scramble eggs with a splash of milk in a small covered bowl, and leave it in the fridge. Chop or grate all of the cheese, vegetables, and optional additional proteins (bacon, sausage or ham) , and leave them in the fridge in another container. 

In the morning, dump the eggs into a buttered, heated pan to cook. When they stop looking wet, add the cheese and other ingredients. Once the cheese has melted, fold the eggs over. 

Doing all of the steps at once can take up the whole morning, but planning ahead gives you a delicious and nutritious, high-protein, low-carb breakfast in minutes.

Lunch To-Go

Lunch is easier to plan for. It’s not hard to make a sandwich and chop some fruit into a container at night to grab out of the fridge for lunch the next day.

If you aren’t watching your carbs, a well-built sandwich can have all of the nutrients of a salad, but it’s easier to take with you on the go. 

If you are watching carbs, ditch the bread and bulk up your salad with extra leafy greens, like lettuce or spinach, and extra protein like grilled chicken and hard-boiled eggs. A well-made salad can be filling, tasty, nutritious, and entirely carb-free, but it won’t travel as well as a sandwich unless you make it into a lettuce lunch wrap using iceberg or romaine leaves.

Dinners For Days

Dinner can be harder to plan for, but there are more opportunities if you do. Meal planning for dinners often involves making bulk meals as though you were preparing food for a large number of people. You then take out one serving and freeze the rest for future meals.

This can be done easily enough with meat by preparing different cuts of, say, chicken, fish, or steak, from a larger piece of meat and preserving the rest.

While this can seem expensive at first because larger pieces of meat are more expensive than smaller pieces of meat, if you look at the cost by weight it is usually cheaper by the meal to buy larger pieces and portion them yourself. Once you have a healthy protein, all you need to finish off your meal is a good salad.

Soups are another popular meal planning dish. By making a large serving of soup and portioning it out, you can be sure to have quick and healthy dinners for days to come. Because soup keeps longer in the freezer than other foods, by making new batches of soup before your frozen old batches run out you can add needed variety to your diet. Frozen soups also make excellent to-go lunches that can be heated up in a microwave as a break from cold sandwiches.

Soups have another meal planning benefit: they can be prepared in a crock-pot or slow-cooker. By putting all of the ingredients in ahead of time and turning the appliance on, you can save valuable time by cooking your soups over night or while you are at work. These appliances typically come with recipe booklets to guide you in choosing the proper setting for the timing and content of your meal.

Hopefully, this article has inspired you to try meal planning in order to quickly and easily set yourself up with healthier, home-cooked menu options with all of the convenience of frozen dinners and take-out.

Losing weight this way still involves being careful with the ingredients you choose, but it is still the best way to balance a healthy diet with a busy schedule.