A Guide on How to Prepare a Healthy Meal

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If you’ve ever been discouraged by the long and intricate process of preparing healthy and nutritious food on your own, we’re here to tell you that you’re not alone.

Planning and preparing your own meal while keeping everything healthy can sometimes seem impossible. We all tend to have such busy lifestyles nowadays that it’s a struggle to fit everything in there!

But trust us when we say cooking healthy meals without exhausting yourself is possible. You just need to know a few tips and tricks for it.

cooking healthy meals

Today, we’ll share some of those very tips. We’ll show you how to make planning and preparing healthy meals easier.

With our guide, we promise that you won’t need to spend an entire day in the kitchen to get everything done. As long as these tips are followed, you will surely be out of the kitchen in no time!

1. Know the Method That Works for You

Before setting out to make your own meals, knowing your preferred method of preparing goes a long way.

You see, as Health Essentials notes, that there isn’t a single way of preparing healthy meals. There are so many methods available that you can choose the ones that work best for you.

Sticking to the methods that work best for you will encourage you to consistently prepare your own meals.

You can discover more and more methods as you explore recipes, but here are some of the most popular:

  • Cooking by batch. It refers to preparing multiple sets of meals to be portioned out for the weeks or even months to come. To prevent portions spoiling, we recommend storing them inside the freezer.
  • Cook meals ahead of time. If you have no time to prepare meals for the week, cooking meals in advance would work best for you. All you need to do is reheat them when the time comes.
  • Ready-to-cook ingredients. Preparing ingredients prior to cooking works best if you prefer to cook meals right before serving. You may prep ingredients right before going to bed, after work. You may even prep ingredients for some meals several days in advance!
2. Storage Is a Must

After determining which method works best for you, it’s time to think about how you’re going to keep your meals fresh and organised. Again, containers and the fridge are lifesavers here.

We strongly recommend going for air-tight, microwaveable, and dishwasher-friendly containers to minimise the work you have to do when reheating food and cleaning containers.

More than that, they can be trusted with maintaining the freshness of your meals, even more so when stored inside the fridge.

3. Keep Everything Simple

Simple, when it comes to preparing food, doesn’t mean mediocre.

In fact, a lot of nutritionists recommend staying away from recipes with a complicated cooking process and a lot of ingredients. There’s a higher chance of upsetting the balance of your stomach with more ingredients, after all.

There are a lot of meals you can come up with when using basic ingredients… such as vegetables, fruits, proteins, and even bread. You just have to dig deep into your creativity in order to discover a recipe that fits right into your time and resources.

4. Pick Your Recipes

Recipes can be categorised in endless ways, but all you need to do is make sure that yours is a combination of simple proteins, grains, vegetables, and fruits.

If you’re not sure how to pick your recipes, here are a few tips:

If your recipe comes with a huge amount of sugar, fat and salt, look for a substitute that will reduce the amount used of the unhealthy ingredient.
Look for recipes that come with a variety of colours and textures. These tend to be a lot more interesting — and thus, satisfying — to eat.
For faster cooking, consider recipes where ingredients can be reused. If you prepare a batch of baked chicken, you can serve leftovers with steamed veggies one day and with potatoes another day.

5. Balance Your Recipes

Some of the most healthy and mouth-watering meals out there are balanced in all aspects, from ingredients down to flavours. After all, keeping everything balanced in your meals is the key to keeping it healthy.

When cooking meals, make sure that fats, oils, salts and sweets are used in moderation. While these are what make a meal more delicious, consuming a huge amount of them continuously will only be harmful to your health in the long run

For example, an unhealthy amount of sugar can cause diabetes, obesity, and insulin resistance while too much salt can increase one’s blood pressure.

As for salt, the specialists at Urology Singapore told us that consuming a salty food too often can increase a person’s chances of getting kidney stones.

These aren’t mild health concerns — and some of them may even require some sort of surgical intervention. You wouldn’t want to go under the knife just cause you chose to indulge in food that isn’t balanced, would you?

Anyway, that’s it for our tips on how to make preparing and cooking healthy meals a lot more convenient. After all, healthy food shouldn’t be that hard to make.

We hope our list was able to convince you to start your journey of living healthy. If you can think of tips that can be added to our list, don’t hesitate to share them with us! We’d love to know how others prepare their own healthy meals.

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