4 Minutes with Bill – #2: Beginner’s Guide to Food Prep – with Bill Russell CrossFit Cleveland

Years ago my wife Staci and I used the term “Stop Eating Crap – Eat Real Food” as our motto when it came to cleaning up your eating habits. Simply eliminating or cutting way back on added sugars, cheap vegetable oils and highly processed foods from your diet was our primary recommendation to start improving your nutrition.

It helps to prepare your food in advance so that you have good food choices for all or most of your meals each week. Weekly food prep can be a daunting and time consuming task, but it’s well worth it.

In this video, I have a couple simple suggestions to get you started with a minimal amount of work, while keeping the cost as affordable as possible.  These suggestions are also good for those you are veteran food-preppers during weeks when they simply do not have enough time for their normal cooking routine.

We take 3+ hours together every weekend to prepare healthy food in order to build meals both in advance and ‘on the fly’ for the entire week. That’s too much for most people to start off with, so we recommend taking it in small steps.

Start with cook and/or purchasing several healthy lean protein sources.  It’s easier and less expensive to come up with side dish choices and add your prepared protein choice to each meal. Once you get in this habit, you can start to prepare a side dish or two each week, and slowly increasing until you are able to prepare everything you need for the week yourself.

The attached PDF lists out an example of a typical week’s worth of food that we prepare in advance.  Bill & Staci’s Weekly Food Prep Example

If you want to see how easy it is for me to pack a breakfast and lunch before I leave the house, watch this episode from Bill & Staci’s Paleo Kitchen on why to prepare food in advance.