Military lifestyle, plus family, and Meal prepping...

I'm the military too-- and its always eat and run!! I've been working 12-14 hour night shifts on a 24/7 Ops floor for the last 8 years where junk food is everywhere and when a high stress event occurs we all jump on the coffee and cookies--- bad bad habit! then we are expected to blow away the PT test... It's not easy... So we have to get back to discipline

schmidtr01 wrote: »

I am at a point where I need to really clean up my eating habits. I know meal prepping would be a great tool to do that, however I have no idea how to begin... My current fitness goal is to add muscle strength. I have put on weight to increase my size and now I am tuning up. Any help is greatly appreciated!

I start by looking at the supermarket flyers to see what proteins are on sale and pick a starch and veg to go with them. I subscribe to a few e-newsletters that send me recipes and get inspiration from there if I'm lacking it. Sometimes if I have a few ingredients but no inspiration, I will plug them into the http://allrecipes.com/ ingredient search.

I have a variety of staple vegetables and starches always on hand and as they run low I add them to my whiteboard on the frig, which gets turned into a shopping list.

I rotate some staple recipes - the first time in a month I make fish I use Recipe 1, second time Recipe 2, etc. Well, it only goes up to Recipe 3, lol. I'm a lot more versatile with chicken, as I eat it more. I have a chicken dish I make every week or every other week. This time of year, I make meatloaf at least once per month. I make a pasta dish a few times per month. Etc.

I work from home and am kind of in the boonies, so plan food shopping for when I am out anyway; for example, I go to the gym three times per week and plan ahead to go when I'm there at night during the week as it is less crowded and crowded supermarkets annoy me.