Meal Prepping with Joy & Kadri
On this episode of Financially Naked: Stories from The Financial Gym, two Certified Financial Trainers, Kadri, and Joy are talking about one of the biggest line items in most budgets: food. Where you live, your lifestyle and your schedule are all factors in your overall food spending and there are always opportunities for improvement. With Joy’s side expertise in meal prep coaching, she joins Kadri today to talk about why food spending is a struggle for folks and strategies she shares with clients to improve their food spending habits.
Podcast Notes
Joy loves food, and feels part of her role as a Financial Trainer means coaching clients in other areas, like meal prepping.
Usually, food is people’s third largest line item in the budget, right behind housing and transportation.
There are a number of reasons people struggle to cook at home or overspend on take-out. For many, it’s time management, a lack of knowledge, decision fatigue, or an overall self-care problem.
Time management:
Half of the battle is carving out the time and space to plan, meal prep, and cook.
Keep in mind that every meal you make doesn’t have to be elaborate or complicated.
Decide how many days realistically you’ll be able to cook and make a plan from there. If you only have one or two nights per week, you can cook in batches or plan for leftovers.
Try a ‘buffet style’ meal prep, where you prep a number of different ingredients on one night that can create different dishes throughout the week.
Decision Fatigue:
There are a million gazillion recipes. If you try to search online, it can get overwhelming pretty quickly. Where do you even get started?
When it comes to deciding what you’re going to eat, trim the decision making.
If you have a takeout habit, look at what you regularly order. Can you make it, or a version of something similar at home?
As humans, we get into habits and types of foods we like to eat. You can narrow it down from the millions down to 20 or so things you know you like.
Learning the skills:
Cooking is a skill, and practicing will help you improve!
Once you learn what you like to eat, it’s easier to learn the skills required to make those dishes, rather than feel like you have to know everything.
Meal delivery kits are a great learning tool. They send you the ingredients and recipes, with step-by-step instructions. Even if you don’t continue using the service, keep the recipes you like and add them to your rotation. These are great because you don’t have to stock the pantry with ingredients or spices.
Once you learn the basics, recipes become more guidelines than hard and fast rules you have to follow. You can substitute with what you have at home and get creative.
Other tips & tricks:
If you have a partner, work together and make it fun. You can each have days you’re assigned to pick the recipe.
Joy likes to keep frozen veggies on hand because they’re easy to throw into a dish, and they don’t expire as quickly as fresh veggies do.
If you overspend at the grocery store or struggle to stick to a list, grocery pick-up can be a great way to avoid overspending, since you’re not tempted while walking around the store.
If you spend a lot of money on takeout, explore a meal delivery kit or service. Even if they seem expensive up front, they can be more affordable than takeout once you run the numbers.
If you like to garden, try growing some of your own ingredients. Some herbs and spices can be grown in your window.
Cooking is a skill that can be cultivated, and we all have to start somewhere.
Watch: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
Fin Gym Meal Kit Recommendations:
HelloFresh: A FinGym Trainer favorite! HelloFresh is easy to use, especially for those beginning to learn in the kitchen. The portions are generous enough so there are leftovers the next day too.
Purple Carrot: Are you vegan or vegetarian or trying for a plant-based lifestyle? Then this is the meal kit for you. No meat or animal byproducts are included in any of the recipes.
Some others to try out:
Read more About Meal Prepping on the Blog:
Meet The Trainers
Meet Joy Liu, Level 2 Certified Financial Trainer & Head of Trainer Academy