Keeping Your Cross Training Diet Goals with Meal Prepping

CrossFit athletes have varying diet goals with some leaning on the side paleo while others on counting macros. Whatever your side, one thing you need to do is to get your plan right away so that you enhance your chances of success. One of the ways to ensure clean eating is through meal prep.

Meal prepping involves buying food for a defined period which could be days or weeks or even a month ahead, preparing meals, and storing them in a freezer. The benefit of this is that planning gives you a higher chance of sticking to your CrossFit diet plan and lowers the possibility of falling off the rails.

Advantages of Meal Prepping

There are many advantages you are likely to enjoy meal prepping. Some of them include:

Time Management

Taking time during weekends to prepare your meals for the next couple of days goes a long way in helping you save time as you come home from the gym or work. All you need to do is to pop the food into the microwave and its ready to eat. This gives you more time to concentrate on your CrossFit workouts and even workplace thus boosting productivity and performance.

Discourages Unhealthy Eating

Making dinner when you are exhausted makes the whole experience unexciting which to some extent can push you into junk or improper food preparation.

Cost Efficiency

When you buy in bulk, you end up saving a lot by getting discounts and offers. Also, the huge figure sitting at the bottom of the receipt will make you think twice about unnecessary purchases which again help you in reducing the overall cost. Buying food for the entire week limits extra spending on certain cravings that you may have from meal to meal and this slashes further your expenditure.

Useful Tips for Meal Prepping

To succeed in meal prepping, there are a few elements you need to integrate into your routine. Some of them are:

Planning Ahead

It is important you devote around 10 to 15 minutes to come up with a solid food list covering the length of time under consideration. In your planning, include substitute food options to stand in for some items of stock just in case they become unavailable.

Get Quality Containers

Because of the food volume, you will need a lot of containers for storage. When budgeting for this, you should also include a couple of other containers that you can carry with you to work or the gym. This is a good practice in CrossFit nutrition. Glass containers are the best, but you must take care of them well.

Take Time to Prepare Your Meals

Spending a good time in the kitchen baking, boiling, and frying can be exciting if you plan on it well. Even if you don’t enjoy the exercise, have the bigger picture in mind. It is not necessary that you do all the cooking at one go, but you can allocate time for every round of cooking. For instance, you can decide to start with vegetables and your meats in one session and then plan for another session for the other foods.

For CrossFit beginners in meal prepping, there are lots of trial and errors, but ultimately you will develop a method which works well for you. Get a little bit more creative as you progress.