Transcript: Meal Prep for the Win: How to Stay Out of the Drive-Thru Without Spending Hours in the Kitchen

Yes, it takes planning, but you can keep yourself out of the drive -thru. What's up you guys? Famous Sasha Grant here. Welcome to More Movement Please, the podcast where I hope to inspire you to move your body more. Today I want to talk about meal prepping and the reason this is important to me is because I've told you guys many times I do not subscribe to diet culture. However, I do know that if I don't keep myself out of the drive -thru that I'm basically just opening up myself to taking in additional calories that I don't want to take in. And so I kind of just wanted to share with y 'all how it is that I keep myself out of the drive -thru but also don't spend hours upon hours in the kitchen. the first thing I do is I par cook some stuff and it's kind of similar to what restaurants do. For example, if they are serving pasta, they might par cook a bunch of pasta. Or they'll make a bunch of

sauces in advance so that whenever someone orders it, it doesn't take very long to put the meal together. And so that's the very thing that I do with my meals. One of the things I'll do is I go to Sam's Club and I will get like 10 pounds of chicken breast. And I will actually prepare all of that chicken breast the same way at the same time. I bake it all. And I do what's called velveting the chicken where you coat it in baking soda and you let it sit for 30 minutes so that it breaks down a little bit of the muscle tissue.

And you rinse it thoroughly and then you bake it. And so the reason I do this is it gives it a little bit more of a tender texture so that it's not so hard. Because that's one of the big things that I get annoyed about whenever it comes to chicken breasts is that it seems like it's always dry and rubbery. And so by doing this method, I have found that I enjoy chicken breasts a lot more. And so even though it's a little bit of a leaner meat, I enjoy it more. And the reason I bake it the same way for every single time that I do this is because I add the sauces and the seasonings for my meals later. So for example, last night, my husband and I had chicken tikka. And so what I did is I took one pound of that chicken that I had already cooked. And then I added the spices and the seasonings and the sauce to it. And then... made some rice to go with it. And within a few minutes, I had dinner.

And so my active cooking time was only about 15 minutes. Yeah, sure, it took about 45 minutes for the meal to be made and be ready. But my active time was only about 15 minutes. And so that's one quick way that I can put together a meal that tastes really, really good, doesn't have as many calories as I would get in a restaurant or in a fast food joint. And I still, you know, get a really good meal and I don't spend as much money. So that's just one of the things that I do. to keep myself out of the drive -thru another thing I do is I actually will bulk prep as much breakfast in advance as I possibly can for example yesterday my husband and I had waffles for breakfast and what I did is instead of just making waffles enough for just that morning I made a bunch and then put the rest into the freezer so now if we are having waffles again I can just take out just the exact amount that I need for that breakfast

and then I just pop them in the toaster and boom, I have waffles ready to go. And so instead of it taking a long time to make breakfast, I can have breakfast ready in about 15 to 20 minutes. So another thing that I do is I bulk cook our breakfast sausage. I will go and get a bunch of sausage and then I will bake it all and then freeze it and have it ready to go. I can just pop it in the microwave for about a minute and then I have sausage ready to go whenever I need it. I do that with a lot of my different things.

Like I'll marinate pork for pork dishes. I will marinate lamb chops for lamb chops. I try to prepare as much in advance as humanly possible and then keep it in the freezer until I'm ready to eat. And so a lot of the meals that I do, the prep time is usually only about 15 to 20 minutes. And then... Yeah, it might take longer than that to actually cook it, but it's not active time. I can be working on something else while I'm waiting on it. So one of the things that I've started doing while my food is cooking is I'll either start doing a Zumba dance or I will start doing, you know, I'll do different exercises that I find on YouTube or, you know, we've even done stuff like, you know, taking the dogs for a quick walk around the block, depending on how long it is that it's going to take for the item to cook and depending on the method of cooking.

That's just some of the things that I do to, like I said, just keep myself out of the drive -thru. That's my big goal. I don't want to buy a bunch of prepackaged stuff. We've gotten really, you know. accustomed to not having prepackaged stuff. For example, one of our things that we used to eat whenever we first got married was we would eat hamburger helper. It was quick and it was easy, but I quickly found out how I could make a homemade version of it that was healthier and tasted better. And it was actually cheaper.

So, and it took the same amount of time and it was like, if it's going to take the same amount of time and it's going to be cheaper and healthier, might as well go with that. So that's, that's like the big thing that I can recommend is. Like take every single thing you possibly can and prep it in advance as much as you can. Like I will buy peppers and I will cut them up and then freeze them. I will buy, you know, onions and cut them up and freeze them. You know, anything that I can freeze, I will freeze. And then that way, whenever it's time to eat, I can make my meals much, much faster. I even do this with like peas and carrots whenever I'm trying to make a quick stir fry. You know, I'm a huge fan of frozen vegetables because that way I don't have to sit there and like. cook a lot. I love to cook. Don't get me wrong, but I am a very busy person. I do run my own business and I have a lot of clients that I have to take care of.

And so. I know that if I am going to be going to the gym and doing my work and, you know, all these other things, I have to make sure that I'm keeping myself away from going out to eat and going to the drive -thru. So I don't know if this will help you guys, but I just thought I'd just recommend it as some of the things that I do to keep myself out of the drive -thru and out of going out to eat. Because that's a question I get a lot is, you know, you're always so busy.

How do you have time to actually eat at home? And that's the big thing. And yes, I do admit that, you know, whenever we're doing these homework days where... We're spending, you know, an hour or two hours, sometimes even three hours bulk prepping all of this food. Yeah, it does take time, but it saves me so much time overall that it's worth it for us. And so. If you can take a look at what it is that you cook normally or what you eat normally, I highly recommend just figuring out what you can bulk prep in advance.

And another thing that I do that I should probably talk about, but I just didn't even think about it until this moment, is we meal plan ahead of time. Every single time we go to the grocery store, we have a list for 14 days worth of meals that we can have for two weeks. It doesn't lock us in to, oh, we have to have, you know, chicken on Monday and beef on Tuesday and fish on Wednesday. We don't do that. But we do pick like seven recipes that have leftovers that we can have for a two week period. And the good thing about doing our shopping this way is, like I said, it doesn't lock us into specific days and times of when we eat, but it does. help us to purchase only the items that we're going to be cooking so that we can reduce food waste and reduce how much money we're spending. And we don't ever have to ask that dreaded question of what's for dinner.

We can figure it out really quickly because we already know, hey, these are the ingredients we have. These are the meals we can make. And we have the choices right there for us. The other thing we do is we always cook once and eat twice. And so one of the things I'll do is like I'll cook on Monday and Tuesday. That way I have leftovers on Wednesday. And then on Thursday, I'll cook another meal so that I have two more days of leftovers. And I kind of just keep that cycle going so that there's always at least one set of leftovers in my fridge so that I don't have to worry about, OK, if I got really busy today, I don't have time to cook. What do I do? Well, it's OK. I've already got leftovers. And I do that a lot with. things like meatloaf and lasagna like every time I'm making a lasagna I always make two I will have one for that night and then I have the next one frozen so that whenever I get busy or if something happens and I don't

have time to cook I can just quickly take it out of the freezer and throw it in the oven and I do that with meatloaf too where I will make a meatloaf and I cut it in half because I make a very large meatloaf I make a meatloaf I'll cut it in half and I'll put half of it in the freezer so that on a busy day, if I don't have time, I can just throw it in the oven, add a quick vegetable and boom, I've got dinner and I don't have to worry about it. So I hope these ideas inspire you to start thinking a little bit differently about how it is you handle your food, because the whole goal of this is not to restrict myself as to what I'm going to consume, but it is to make sure that I'm making healthier choices so that I still get the food I want, but without paying a ridiculously overpriced amount of money or. higher calorie count than I would actually choose. Because let's face it, every time you go out to eat, what is it that

makes the food taste so good? A lot of extra butter, a lot of extra fat, a lot of extra salt, and it's usually fried crap, right? So that's kind of what I do to make sure that we always have a decent meal available to us. If you've not thought of doing something like this before, just kind of open your mind to it. I'm not going to lie to you guys and tell you that it's really, really easy. It does take some thought. It does take some time, but... When you start actually putting yourself in a position where you're thinking about these things for the long term, like one of the things I did is I put together a spreadsheet so that I know every single meal I know how to cook and every single item on that spreadsheet links to a recipe so that I know exactly what is going to be required for those meals. And so it's just simple things like that, that, yes, take a lot of time to front load in the beginning.

But now that I have those systems in place. Meal time does not stress me out anymore. And that's what's important to me. So I get in my more movement and I get in proper meals and it's just a win -win all the way around. We're saving more money than we've ever saved on groceries before. And yet we don't go without. And so. Yeah, I really hope that this helps someone. I hope that this inspires you. And I want to know what you guys do. How do you handle your like meal prepping and your meal planning and things like that?

Hit me up at famousashleygrant .com backslash fitness. I would love to hear from y 'all. Tell me all about your fitness journey, how you're eating healthier, how you're making wise choices. And I can't wait to hear from you. I really love, I love it when you guys give me feedback. It's one of my favorite things in the whole world. Onwards and upwards, my friends. Have you worked out today?