What I Meal Prepped for my First Week of M2
Updated: Mar 20, 2023
Hey Friends!
I mentioned in my Prepping for M2 post that meal prep makes me a better person.
And it's absolutely true. It allows me to eat food that makes me feel good and excites me for meal time. It's a time efficient way to show love toward myself & care for my wellbeing. AND it helps me avoid the hangry grumps.
For my first week of M2, I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to eat & meal prepped for this busy week. Since I've talked about how much I enjoy meal prep, I thought it would be fun to share with you a very realistic example of meal prep I've actually done.
Before we start, this is not nutrition advice. I am not a nutrition professional, and every body has its own nutritional needs. I am by no means saying this is how you should eat, I am just sharing the foods I've chosen to eat this week.
Let's get into the yummy good stuff!
I take a lot of inspiration from things I see online - so I will share where I got my ideas from and links for you to check out if you're interested!
Breakfast:
I like starting my day with sort of a "phased" breakfast? I'll get up early to have a couple hours to work on things. When I wake up, I like having my coffee and a sweeter breakfast item to go with it. Then mid-morning, I'm hungry so I'll have a smoothie usually. This week I meal prepped:
Smoothie grab and dump bowls for each day
Zucchini Baked Oatmeal for my early morning sweet addition to my coffee
Smoothies:
I don't like blending up the smoothies themselves and storing them in the fridge all week, because they separate and lose their charm with time. I do like meal prepping them in some way though because it's so much faster in the morning. (Instead of having to cut up fruit & scoop everything into the blender). Long story short, the way I prep smoothies is to put all the contents I want in my smoothie into a container, minus the milk or whatever fluid. On the day of, I just grab the container and dump everything in, add my almond milk, and go. This week I wanted a smoothie every day, so I prepped 5 of these bowls!
I love following Abbey Sharp online, and saw the yummy smoothies she makes on her instagram. I decided to try out her go to smoothie this week!
Ingredients: mixed frozen berries, banana (I did half banana most days), handful of spinach, a scoop of peanut butter, hemp hearts, and some oat or almond milk (depending on what's in my fridge).
To check out Abbey's instagram & see the smoothie she makes (and highlights in a number of reels), follow her at: @abbeyskitchen
Zucchini Baked Oatmeal:
This is another recipe from Abbey Sharp, and is a great meal prep because you can bake it ahead of time, cut it up into perfect sized pieces for each morning, and boom, you've got a delicious breakfast. It has just the right amount of sweetness that I want in the morning, and is a really cozy way to start the day. I'm also a pretty huge oatmeal fan, so this was right up my alley!
Lunch:
For me, lunch needs to be something pretty satisfying, because the afternoon munchies get real for me. It also needs to be something I could quickly throw into a lunch box and go, if I need to be on campus over lunch on a particular day. This week, I decided to resort to a go-to recipe for me that's filling & delicious:
Stuffed Bell Peppers
Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Stuffed Bell Peppers:
When I started making these, I was originally inspired by Katy, aka Lusterlux, on YouTube when she did a stuffed bell pepper video with her husband. I don't do it exactly like that anymore, but still pretty close! These are a great meal prep option because again, you can bake however many you need ahead of time, and they store great in the fridge all week. They are also easy to pick up and transfer to a lunch bag for taking on the go.
Katy's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFJtt2bo3bA
This week, I grabbed two pounds of ground turkey, one white onion, some brown rice, a can of tomato sauce, a can of diced tomatoes, a can of tomato paste, and 10 bell peppers for my lunches. I diced the white onion and threw it in a pan with some olive oil and garlic until it started to become translucent. Added the ground turkey, with a healthy amount of seasoning. Cooked up a good amount of brown rice in my rice cooker, that I added into the pan once the turkey was browned. Then mixed in the cans of tomatoes. Let it simmer for a bit, and scooped the mixture into my 10 bell peppers (with the heads cut off just like the queen of hearts says). I topped each pepper with some cheese of choice, and baked at 375 until the cheese was melted and the peppers looked cooked.
(You may notice I don't give exact measurements or cooking times on things, but that's because I like to cook more on instinct. It something looks right to me or tastes right, then that's how I measure, so sorry!)
Roasted Sweet Potatoes:
Sweet potatoes are a really nice edition to the bell peppers, because they are both warm and cozy foods. They are also easy to prep ahead of time, and store in the fridge really well. The flavor compliments the ingredients of the stuffed bell peppers, and I personally love the richness of sweet potatoes.
This is another recipe that's more about instinct. Grab your sweet potatoes, cube them up, and cover them in canola oil with some seasoning. I did salt, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. The level of seasoning is really based on your taste. Then I roasted them in the oven between 375 and 400 degrees until they looked done. (Again, sorry for the lack of precision, but when you've cooked long enough you just stop measuring things! Or at least I have, hehe)
Snacks:
Prepping for the afternoon snackies is very important to me. If I don't have snacks on hand that energize & sustain me, I'll end up really cranky or exhausted or both. Some snacks I have on hand are:
sliced apples and peanut butter
trader joe's pita crackers and hummus (I LOVE hummus)
edamame and cashews
fig toast: whole grain toast, brie and fresh cream spread, cut up figs, topped with hot honey and pumpkin seeds
a granola almond cereal (not as filling, but very tasty)
Dinner:
I didn't do any major dinner meal prep, but I did prepare a colorful, Mediterranean salad that is a great compliment to any meal. I just left the dressing off, but went ahead & mixed all the ingredients together.
I essentially chopped up cucumbers, grape tomatoes, red onion, a bell pepper, and tossed it with chickpeas and feta cheese. I wanted this prepped salad to be supporting whatever protein + carb I ate that night, since I usually like to cook those things on the day of. I love fresh salmon, chicken, pasta, or rice, so those items are usually things I can quickly make on a week night. Chopping veggies is honestly what takes me the longest, so prepping the salad was a real time saver!
Dessert:
Another not very complicated item, but I do like to plan for dessert options because when that after dinner sweet attack hits - it hits HARD. I want my dessert to make me feel good, not give me sugary jitters after my meal, and not over stuff me. So in tune with the summertime spirit, I prepped popsicles!
Another extremely easy thing to achieve - I literally blended up a bag of mixed frozen fruit with my leftover bottle of strawberry keifer I needed to eat, and added some cacao nibs for a nice texture. I lined my popsicle molds with some melted fudge sauce, poured in my berry cacao mixture, and popped them in my freezer!
Additional Items I Meal Prepped: A nice big pitcher of decaf, unsweet iced tea for those hot afternoons, and a couple deep breaths to help ease me into another year of medical school.
Overall, these are just some food items I enjoyed making and eating for my first week of M2. I hope they can give you some food inspiration if you need it, but please remember that food is designed to nourish your body & soul. It's not an avenue for judging others, it has no morality of its own, and its properties affect people differently. Food can be a playful, creative outlet, it can be medicine for an individual, but most importantly, it is what you make it. Your relationship with food matters, and I hope this will be a safe space for you to explore that in your own way.
I'm now done with my first week of M2 - and heading into an exam next week. Wish me luck!
May your summer not be too humid, may your furry friends give you an extra tight snuggle, may your food be extra vibrant, and may the odds be ever in your favor ~ <3
Sincerely,
Natasha LaGrega
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