Simplifying Meal Prep for the Busy Bee with Ashley Legg
Apr 29, 2024Season 2Episode 5
Cynthia Johnson and Ashley Legg
Join Ashley Legg on today’s empowering episode of the Get it Girl Podcast, where she unlocks the secrets of meal prep for those with a full schedule but a hunger for simplicity and health. Ashley, a nutrition specialist and personal trainer, not only cuts through the confusion surrounding diet culture but also shares easy, adaptable meal prep tips to fit your unique lifestyle. From assembling versatile tuna or shrimp salads to crafting protein-rich snacks like edamame, pumpkin seeds, and protein balls, Ashley covers it all. She discusses the importance of planning meals around your busiest times, optimizing grocery shopping, and even incorporating fun meals to maintain motivation and balance. For our plant-based listeners, there’s something for you too, with ideas like a hummus platter that turns snacking into a nutritious affair. Dive into this episode for a blend of practical advice and insightful strategies to revolutionize your meal planning, reduce stress, and nourish both body and soul. Whether it’s simplifying dinner time or snacking smarter, Ashley’s guidance is here to ensure that you prep to succeed and enjoy every bite along the way. Tune in and transform your meal prep from a chore into a delightful part of your wellness journey.
Join Ashley Legg on today’s empowering episode of the Get it Girl Podcast, where she unlocks the secrets of meal prep for those with a full schedule but a hunger for simplicity and health. Ashley, a nutrition specialist and personal trainer, not only cuts through the confusion surrounding diet culture but also shares easy, adaptable meal prep tips to fit your unique lifestyle. From assembling versatile tuna or shrimp salads to crafting protein-rich snacks like edamame, pumpkin seeds, and protein balls, Ashley covers it all. She discusses the importance of planning meals around your busiest times, optimizing grocery shopping, and even incorporating fun meals to maintain motivation and balance. For our plant-based listeners, there’s something for you too, with ideas like a hummus platter that turns snacking into a nutritious affair. Dive into this episode for a blend of practical advice and insightful strategies to revolutionize your meal planning, reduce stress, and nourish both body and soul. Whether it’s simplifying dinner time or snacking smarter, Ashley’s guidance is here to ensure that you prep to succeed and enjoy every bite along the way. Tune in and transform your meal prep from a chore into a delightful part of your wellness journey.
Welcome to the Get it girl community where yes, you can have it all. We are redefining confidence and life, business health and happiness. If you are motivated, full of drive a go getter and looking for ways to achieve it all without losing yourself to the constant grind, this space is for you. We're teaching you to take control of your life to boost confidence to feel good inside and out, which then spills into every aspect of your life. You show up better for yourself, your relationships, your career, your passions. We also focus a lot on bucket lists to help ignite that passion and adventure in you when it comes to different seasons in your life, to relationships, travel, food, and so much more. So look in the mirror and say it loud and proud. Yes, you can have it all. Get it girl, we are changing the conversation around women and success from empowerment to celebration of achievement. Welcome back to the ghetto girl Podcast. I'm one of your hosts Ashley leg. And this is a solo podcast talking about meal prep for The Busy Bee. Now this can be a scary topic for a lot of people. Because food is very individualized. It's very personal. It can be scary for some because reading labels can be you know very hard for people or knowing what's good for you. What's not what diet works, should you be cutting carbs, should you just be eating a high fat diet, there's so many diets out there that are thrown at us, because diet culture is so huge, it's a billion dollar industry. Okay, one of my favorite things about my job as a nutrition specialist and personal trainer is to help simplify food for people. And to really help them figure out what works for their body and their goals, what's sustainable over a long period of time, and what's doable in our busy lives. So we really try to simplify it and find solutions. So I like to share some meal prep tips with you that hopefully you can take some tools away for yourself, try to implement them and see if they're a good fit. If they're not, don't worry about it. But at least I'm offering you some good advice that has worked for me personally, and for my clients. So the number one thing about meal prep is prepared to succeed. And I actually like to talk more about meal assembling rather meal prep, because it can be a little intimidating, trying to prep individualized meals for the next day. And let's say you have a big family like, that means you're cooking multiple meals, that's hard to do for some people. Some people have to do that, because they work out of their home, they're busy, they're on the go. So they need to prep those meals, so totally fine. But if you have an opportunity to prep certain ingredients, then you can mix and match. And it gives you more variety so that you're not just stuck to one meal all the time or a few meals, and then you have to chip away at those meals. If you prep bulk ingredients, then you can just assemble. So my first tip that I want to share is to plan out your busiest meal and reverse engineer from there. For example, my family, our busiest meal of the day is dinner. And I have two little kids. So they like to eat between 430 and five, which is very early after a busy work day. They're in daycare sometimes. So it's literally a race to the dinner table. If I didn't have a plan, I would be scrambling every single night and be flustered. It would just be stressful. So I always plan out our family dinners the weekend before. That way I know exactly what's on the menu, which means I can create my grocery list. And I can expedite that process by shopping for the menu according to the menu. It just saves time and it saves money. Because if you go to the grocery store with a list and a plan in place, you are less likely to buy things off that list. You're just more structured, you can check things off and you can be like in and out. You could also easily order online for groceries to be delivered to also save some time. And so that's an option there. If you have a plan, you just search for those options, boom, add to cart and you can check out that way. So plan out your busiest meal. Sometimes things change sometimes people don't want something that I had planned and it's okay that's part of life things happen. Just shift you adjust and you adapt. But for the most part, I would say my family really does stay to the plan. And it's really nice because I know that ahead of time that I'm going to have a nourishing dinner with a lean protein source ours with healthy carbs with healthy fat and micronutrients from our fruits and our veggies, so I always try to plan meals out that way. So whatever that busy meal looks like for you plan that first and then figure out the rest of your day from there. Tip number two is to double your recipe or make in bulk so you have enough for lunches the next day. If you do have leftovers, let's say you make a chicken dish and you have leftover chicken. Well, that's an easy protein source that you can mix and match with something else. Some veggies, add your car, pick your healthy fat boom you have a quick meal. I'm just going to give you a couple ideas for how to make chicken or what meals you can make with chicken. You could do easy tacos. The next day the chickens already made. You have your shells, you add your chicken you got some lettuce in there, maybe some Greek yogurt, your pani Greek yogurt as a sour cream replacement, some chopped tomatoes, drizzle of you know hot sauce or salsa. And there's some tacos, you could also just layer your chicken on a bed of rice with some veggies, you could make a chicken wrap, you could make a chicken sandwich. There's just so many things that you could do. And it makes it easier by just having a little more chicken prepped. And so it saves you a little bit of time the next eggs you're like okay, I have chickens, I'm gonna have something with chicken and you can work around that. Tip number three is to have easy snacks, breakfast and lunch staples in mind. So we talked a little bit about lunch from leftovers. I'm going to also share some other ideas for you when it comes to creating an easy lunch that has like minimal prep, which I love because there are options out there. It's just a matter of really trying to plan ahead and figure those out for yourself what's doable. So let's talk about breakfast. Some easy options are yogurt bowls, have your main base of your yogurt of choice and then you can add some fruit in there for your micronutrients, you could add some pumpkin seeds for your healthy fat, add some granola for some carbs, super easy to assemble the day up. You can even prepare it ahead I will just leave the granola separate so that way it doesn't get soggy and the yogurt when you're like you know a viewer have to transport to work or whatnot. Just put it in a separate container or a little baggie and then you can add on top when you're ready to eat. Another option is a balanced smoothie. Use your milk of choice. You could add protein powder here, spinach, frozen banana, add some oats for a little more thickness and some healthy grains in there fiber, blend it all up. Easy peasy. You have a Nutrient Pack to shake on the go. You could also do avocado smoked salmon toast, use, you know whatever toast you prefer. I love sourdough. I also love the brand bread alone and Dave's Killer Bread is also really good. layer your mashed avocado on the toast. Add your smoked salmon, and then you can sprinkle some microgreens on tap Add some salt and pepper and that's a really good easy breakfast. Some lunch ideas are make a protein box. I love this if you're like a little bit of a snacker and you like variety, add some pre cooked hard boiled eggs, cucumbers mix berries, cottage cheese and almonds. You just have so many ways that you can eat this meal you could dip your cucumbers in your cottage cheese pick out you know each thing one by one you could add your berries and your almonds to your cottage cheese and make a little cottage cheese bowl. There's just so many things you could do with a little snack box. It's so easy and very customizable to you based on what you'd like. We talked about chicken being leftovers. You could also use canned chicken. If you're really in a bind, add it onto a salad and then you know add some more ingredients in there to make it fun. I love quinoa precooked quinoa or sweet potatoes and salads to add some texture and some boldness and it just really lights up the salad like those taste buds because there's texture and color I like when I think about my salads, I think a variety of colors, varieties of textures, and it's just so satisfying when you find that perfect combination for yourself. Another idea is an egg salad plate so similar to like the snack plate, you could have pre cooked hard boiled eggs and you could chop them up and mix them with a little avocado Mayo oil and some dried dill salt pepper sliced red pepper on the side. Gluten Free crackers and you can just dip in there and it's just so yummy. Some easy dinner ideas. Tuna lettuce wraps, can tuna mix that again with some avocado oil Mayo if you like that you can add some crunch in there with some chopped celery or chopped bell pepper, salt, pepper and then you could layer that tuna salad into you know a tortilla wrap or lettuce boat piece of toast the the varieties are endless. Think about what you like and then customize that to you. Shrimp Salad or shrimp tacos are really easy and quick to make the night of because shrimp just cook super fast. You could also do a hummus platter. So this is for my PLANT BASE people. You could have hummus as your main protein and fat source and then you could add your veggies to dip in or crackers. It's just so easy to do, especially if you're in a bind. So we talked about breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now let's talk about some healthy snacks. I love at a mommy and they're actually pretty high in protein for that type of snack for a half cup. There's nine grams of protein. Pumpkin seeds are also really good to snack on eight grams of protein and two tablespoons beef jerky. You could look for turkey jerky, chopsticks those are really good and easy to transport with you and a lot of time is serving has around 10 grams of protein which is pretty good. Protein keeps you fuller longer so I love talking about high protein snacks. Cottage cheese, yum. So good. You can make this sweet or savory. Sometimes I will dip chips and cottage cheese or if I want savory, you can add strawberries and a little bit of sweetener and it's such a delight light and sweet treats so good. And one cup of cottage cheese there's 24 grams of protein so it's it's really good when it comes to a filling snack. could also search on Pinterest recipes for protein balls. Those are so fun to make. I actually make these often with oatmeal, some sort of nut butter, some dark chocolate chips, I love that and banana and you can just mix everything together and honey or maple syrup to mix everything together shape among balls and you can store them in the fridge for I would say like up to five days. They're so easy because you can grab one to two as a little snack on the go. Greek yogurt cups. I love this you can make your own little parfait similar to a breakfast we talked about earlier. layer your break yogurt with berries, little granola, maybe a drizzle of peanut butter and you have such a good substantial snack. Hard Boiled Eggs have talked about those a lot. Those are so easy to prepare ahead for the week. And just grab and go. Protein Bars. There's some good options out there. I love Aloha protein bars. I love Kai's bars, and they're amazing actually have a discount, like day 15. If you want to save some money, they're an amazing company based out of Oklahoma, they give back based on every bar that's purchased. So they give back to someone in need, which I think is so special. You could also offer a protein shake back to the canned tuna, you could bring that and snack on that with some rice cakes or something. Turkey roll ups are super easy. So I gave you just a lot of ideas for easy meal and snacks. But it's just so nice to have those staples in mind. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel, start writing down things that you currently like and then fine tune them from there. But at least you have those options in the bank so that when it comes to the moment of you need something to eat, you have go twos and I think that is so crucial when it comes to acting quick when you need to. Tip number four, which we talked a lot a little bit earlier is to make your shopping list based on your meals and snacks. Again, that's going to save you time it's going to save you money. And it's just less stress because you already have things planned out. Now you just have to execute and shop and get them in your home and ready for you when you need that. And my last tip is my fun tip. And it's to plan a fun meal out to look forward to that really helps you stay disciplined in the day to day when we have goals. Of course there has to be a layer of discipline there and knowledge when it comes to eating the right portion through your body choosing the healthier options listening to your body cues, eating when you're hungry, but stopping when you're full. Sometimes that just gets hard to maintain over a long extended period of time. So when you have something fun to look forward to it gives you that little bit of a mental break. Okay, I'm not going to cook dinner tonight I'm going to enjoy myself out I'm going to savor every bite and then I'm going to get back to planning ahead and preparing to succeed and it's just makes things exciting. So I hope you took something away from these tips. This is not me telling you what to eat. This is just me trying to inspire you that meal prepping or meal assembling can be fun and it doesn't have to be boring. You just have to find more creative and innovative ways to make variations of your favorite foods and a healthier way. Because what we put in our body truly does matter for a lot of things beyond aesthetics and progress physically for a healthy heart for optimal brain function, to be able to have energy to move around day to day to make sure that you are thriving off nutrients that are so beneficial for your body. Protein supports lean muscle carbs, our body's main energy source healthy fats help balance our hormones, micronutrients, those vegetables and those fruits provide us all the vitamins and minerals our body needs. It's just crucial that we're getting a variety and we're minimizing a lot of the processed foods because there are just so many bad ingredients in them that can hurt you in the long term. I do believe everything in moderation. So really what it comes down to is figuring out what works for you what works for your body. Focus on nourishing foods first and fun things in moderation. I hope this helped you guys I love talking about this stuff. And if you would like me to dive more into nutrition based topics, I would be more than willing to please feel free to rate our podcast. We love reviews. Please share this with someone if you think that they need some meal prep tips, and to subscribe so you never miss an episode of The Get it girl podcast. Can't wait to talk to you guys soon. We'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the gadget girl podcast. If you're not already, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a new episode. Our number one goal is to connect, inspire and to build a movement where you never feel alone. See you in the next episode.
