Why Dinner Should Be Your Top Priority When Meal Prepping

There's nothing worse than trying to put together a healthy meal when you're short on time, and your stomach's already rumbling. Luckily, meal prep can make life a bit easier. Saving you time and money while minimizing waste, there isn't a drawback to planning next week's menu. Not to mention that meal prep also offers convenience and peace of mind knowing that meals are just that much closer to being ready to eat. 

Depending on the household, meal prep can look different. Sometimes it entails batch cooking; other times, it means perfectly portioning variations of meals. It can even be as simple as preparing components of a meal to make for easier assembly: boiling eggs in bulk, chopping vegetables so they're ready to add to dishes, or cooking up proteins to work into salads and meals throughout the week.

However, you might be self-sabotaging your meal prep without even noticing it if you're not focusing on the right meal. For instance, if you make overnight oatmeal and grab-and-go salads for the week ahead but still find yourself with no time left for dinner, it might be time to rethink which meals could benefit the most from prepping.

While meal prepping can be done for any meal (including snacks), you should probably start prioritizing dinner. According to The National Restaurant Association, most people opt for takeout when it comes to dinnertime. Naturally, after a long day at work, it's easy to understand why many aren't motivated to whip up a balanced meal. This is precisely where meal prep comes in, offering a solution to speed up the process of getting dinner on the table. What makes dinner such a demanding meal?

Essentially, dinner requires more effort on your behalf, making the meal worthy of being the top priority during meal prep — let us explain. While the average breakfast and lunch tend to consist of fresh and packaged foods like fruit, yogurt, cereal, or sandwiches, this means that these meals tend to be easy to put together in a pinch.

In contrast, dinnertime typically requires more manual processing to create healthy meals. Given the additional time and labor needed to craft these cooked meals, it's no wonder that your meal prep efforts are best reserved for dinner. Believe us when we say that it can make a world of difference.