Starting weekly meal prep

What do you mean by meal prep? Do you mean cooking?

Anyway with regards to cooking I do have lots of tips. What's critical i think for many people these days is recognising that life is busy, you should try to be pretty organised with your shopping and your cooking.

here's some ideas.

1. Fill your fridge with nutritiuos whole foods, especially fruit and vegies and particularly whatever is in season. But make sure you have all the basics on hand to so that you have what you need there when you decide to do something. - e.g. breadcrumbs, olive oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, herbs and spices you can accumulate as you need them, tomato paste, cornflour, various vinegars, stock cubes, cans of cooked legumes or dried ones, pasta, basmati rice, short grain rice, eggs. Build up a variety of condiments that are useful in cooking for different types of cuisines. You don't need to rush out and buy them all at once though.

2. Cook dishes with plenty of vegetables. learn how to cook vegetables. This is key because we all need to eat more vegetables and if we want to enjoy them, we need to be good at cooking them in interesting ways.

3. Keep it varied. Don't just cook and eat the same things over and over again or you will get bored.

4. If you are not much of a cook, use recipe books and try to seek out the good ones. The simplest way i can say this is to go for traditional cuisines not restaurant food. And have a variety of cuisines on your shelf especially european and mediterranean because these are probably the flavours you are most accustomed to already. But if you background is another culture, then get hold of those trad cooking books. Others which are good are Indian, various asian. Also look for books that just focus on vegetables. My favourite book for the last year and a half has been this one http://www.amazon.com/Mediterranean-Cookbook-Marie-Pierre-Moine/dp/1465417613. Its good because the food is also very healthy.

5. Cook up more than you need for one meal and store in the freezer. If you build up a number of dishes to have in your fridge and freezer at any one time, then there's not much you have to do for each meal.

Successful long term weightloss is more about what you eat and how much than what you do at the gym.

If your food is enjoyable and healthy, you will keep going. If you able to be organised in the kitchen you will enjoy it. Note that issue to avoid is having to cook when you are tired. This is why i recommend -precookeod meals as much as possible.

I've been doing this a while, but I just recently decided to focus on prepping meals in advance because I realized I was wasting too many calories on last minute meals out. I stumbled upon this blog about successful weight loss based on MFP user data and it motivated me to figure out cooking at home: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss/successful-weight-loss-habits

The MFP blog is actually a great source for recipes you can prep ahead of time and I also the recipe forum is great for getting ideas for recipes that are easy to make and "worth it" in terms of calories. Cooking light tends to have recipes that taste good and are good calorie bargains. What I've been doing lately is figure out what I feel like eating and then trying a few well-rated recipes that fits that "taste" until I find a winner. I found a pretty easy low cal chili recipe that is a winner in my book and will now make it into my make and freeze rotation from now on.

http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/chili-with-chipotle-chocolate

Good luck!