Mum drops five stone and saves thousands a year by expertly meal prepping

Mum Emily Forbes, 30, has a lot of reasons to sing the praises of meal prepping.

Not only has prepping every meal in advance saved Emily thousands of pounds and hours of evening cooking, but it also helped her drop 5st and 7lbs.

Emily started to experiment with meal prepping back in 2018 as a way to help her slim down her 16st 7lbs, size 18 frame.

The mum had struggled with controlling her portion sizes, and found that meal prepping – setting two hours every Sunday to prepare meals for the week – was a life-changing solution.

Every week Emily, from Melbourne, Australia, spent just a few hours at the weekend making meals such as burrito bowls, curries, pasta bakes, veggie lasagnes, and fried rice, then popped them in the freezer so they were ready to go in the oven each evening.

This took the thinking out of deciding what to eat for every dinner, and got rid of the temptation to spend money on unhealthy takeaways.

Each meal only costs around 80p to £1.60, allowing Emily to ditch her £27.50-a-week takeaway habit and save £1,430 a year.

After adopting this method, Emily was able to drop 35kg and four dress sizes.

She said: ‘The weight issues were partly due to my high carb heavy diet and lack of exercise.

‘But my biggest problem by far was portion control. When you serve dinner on a dinner plate you tend to pile it on.

‘My biggest motivation for wanting to lose weight was the prospect of starting a family, and wanting to be healthy for my kids.

‘During my weight loss journey I wanted healthy meals to take to work to I wasn’t tempted by unhealthy takeaway food.

‘My meal prepping evolved from there. I took inspiration from recipes and changing the quantities and some ingredients that better lent themselves to reheating.’

Mum-of-two Emily’s dream of starting a family have since come true and she is expecting to have her second child in February 2021 with her husband Jeremy, 33.

And after meal prepping helped her not only lose weight, but to help her save time and money, Emily is sharing her story in the hopes that it might inspire others to give meal prepping a go.

She shares her meal prep recipes on her blog, Meal Prep Mum’s Australia.

For those wanting to give meal prepping a go, Emily has these words of advice: My tips for starting meal prep would be to make sure you have enough containers, and cook things that reheat well.

‘For weight loss meal prepping start with things like frittatas and zucchini slices because they are high protein and low carb.

‘You can also add different vegetables and cheeses to keep you interested by changing the flavour.

‘It’s only an hour or two out of your week and you’ll have delicious healthy meals that you will feel so much better for eating.’

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