The key to implementing and maintaining a new habit is making the process to form the habit as easy and automatic as possible. For instance, I enjoy creating and eating freshly-cooked meals every day, so I choose food sources that allow me to make my meals in the morning in the most quick and efficient manner.
Maintaining a meal prep routine that is sustainable from an effort and time standpoint has been a work-in-progress over these last 3 years, but I am at the point where meal preparation is automatic—I have optimized the skill in terms of fitting it within my lifestyle and career.
In my experience between balancing competition prep while maintaining a professional career, the ease in which you can prepare meals determines your compliance to a diet.
If I think in my mind that my meal preparation will be burdensome, forcing me to expend valuable mental energy upon waking, I will be reluctant to want to get up and prepare my meals for the day first thing in the morning.
Therefore, I make my meal prep every morning as effortless as possible. It’s as if my brain is on auto-pilot when I am preparing my meals—it becomes a meditative activity rather than a task. I don’t want to have to think, I just want to do. Eventually, meal prep becomes habit—just another part of my morning routine. I effectively remove all the barriers (i.e., time and energy) to keep me from accomplishing my habit of preparing my meals for the day.
From a high-level, one of the best ways to remove the barrier of time and energy expenditure in meal prep is to choose predominantly “single-macronutrient” foods.
In other words, I isolate macronutrients by certain foods. For instance, I can hit all my macronutrient targets in one day by utilizing the 4 staples of my diet – eggs, liquid egg whites, potatoes, and spinach, all prepared in 15-20 minutes in the morning. I get my protein from the egg whites and whole eggs, my carbohydrates from the potatoes and spinach, and my fats from the whole eggs.
While food variety is key, especially from the standpoint of micronutrients, I find comfort in knowing that I can prepare a quick, nutritious meal with just those 4 food sources.
As this was just an introduction, I will expand on how I prepare these food sources in later posts.
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