Contributed Collaborative Post 

In the age of social media, a lot of our insights into healthy lifestyles come from influencer culture. This applies to food prep as well, and while a lot of the meals you’ll see on apps like Instagram and TikTok look delicious, they’re often not exactly budget-friendly.

Luckily, there are thousands of different ways that you can approach meal planning while operating under a strict budget. From keeping things simple to cooking in big batches, these are a few things to keep in mind for your meal prep mission.

Think simple

With a lot of recipes, things start to get expensive when the ingredient list gets really complicated. Once you start having to buy special pastes, niche sauces, rare kinds of vinegar and spices just to cook a single meal, it quickly becomes almost as (potentially even more) expensive as eating out.

If you want to eat well on a budget, then keep it simple. You just need a few staple, high-quality ingredients (such as some nice meat and some tasty vegetables) cooked just right to have a thoroughly delicious meal in front of you.

Get your macros right

If you’re trying to be healthy with your meal planning, then it’s important to focus on getting your macros right. Luckily, this doesn’t need to be expensive! For protein, you can choose a tinned fish from somewhere like John West.

For carbs, you can go with a sweet potato, whole grain pasta or sourdough bread, and for fats, you can eat things like nuts, avocado and olive oil. Balancing these macronutrients is important if you’re focusing on maintaining a healthy, sustainable diet, and it should soon become easier to automatically assess your meals just by looking at them.

Use seasoning

If you want to make your meals taste delicious on a budget, then you need to buy seasoning materials in bulk and learn how to use them. You’ll work out how to season things perfectly for your pallet, until it becomes second nature.

Use recipe books, but also get creative and think about what flavours might go well together. You can explore as much as you want – who knows what you might stumble across.

Cook big batches

Lastly, cooking in bigger batches can often save you both money and effort. In terms of cost savings, buying the ingredients in bulk (whether that’s meat, vegetables, or a carb like rice) will likely save you quite a lot, and it’ll all add up if you stick to this style of cooking.

More than that though, cooking big batches of a delicious meal in advance, and then freezing them for the coming weeks, can save you a lot of time and effort. You still get to eat well, but you don’t have to take the time every day to cook something potentially quite complicated.

Getting started with meal planning is the hardest part. Once you get over that initial mental hurdle, you’ll find it much easier to keep the ball rolling, hopefully finding wonderful meals you come back to over and over again.

This is a contributed collaborative post