Easy Keto Meal Prep: 4 Weeks of Healthy Ketogenic Meals Plans with 100+ Simple Recipes for Any Day of the Week

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

Imagine not having to figure out what to eat, turn on the stove, cook, and then clean up every single night. Instead, you open your refrigerator and are greeted with the most beautiful sight ever: containers filled with ready-to-eat healthy keto meals stacked on top of each other. High-five for #fridgegoals! You heat up anything you want to eat, and in less than five minutes you’re fueling your body with delicious food while hanging out with the family or catching up on your favorite shows. No stress, no mess, no precious time wasted. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?

Do you think this is too good to be true? What if I tell you that this can be you if you incorporate meal prepping into your weekly routine? Meal prepping will help you work smarter, not harder, by using time efficiently so you can focus on other important things throughout the week without derailing your healthy eating habits.

Enter Easy Keto Meal Prep. This comprehensive four-week meal prep guide provides you with an easy-to-follow game plan that will help you stock your refrigerator with nutrient-dense and tasty meals that you and your family can enjoy for a whole week.

The recipes in this book use simple ingredients that are readily available at any grocery store. Designate one day a week as your dedicated meal-prep day (or pick two days if that’s more convenient for you). On those days, you cook six or seven meals that you can mix and match. This means you aren’t eating the same thing for five straight days! (Because I want to eat the same meal the entire week, said no one ever.)

Easy Keto Meal Prep contains four done-for-you plans, so you don’t have to think about what to eat, create a grocery list, or plan your prep and cook days. Following these four plans will help you get into the habit of preparing your meals weekly so you have enough food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The plans also include free meal days so you can still enjoy a meal out or plan for social events.

Whether you’re a keto newbie or a seasoned pro, I’ve put together resources to help you succeed every week by making the recipes and plans super easy to understand and use. This makes sticking to your keto lifestyle more sustainable and enjoyable!

I started meal prepping at the end of 2015 when my friends Diane Sanfilippo and Tony Kasandrinos and I decided to incorporate counting macros into our lifting and workout routines. Counting macros was tough, but prepping the majority of my meals ahead of time was fun. Before I knew it, I was doing it consistently on Sundays every week. It never felt like work because I really enjoyed cooking and preparing the food.

I shared my weekly videos on Snapchat and then transitioned to Instagram because I wanted to be able to share them with more people. Soon, I released my Four-Week Meal Prep Challenges, which were downloadable PDFs. They contained meal plans, grocery lists, and a game plan to follow. I had a private group of participants on Facebook who showed up each week for accountability and posted updates and photos about the meals they’d cooked by following the plans and recipes in the challenge. Everyone had a lot of fun and shared insight and feedback with fellow meal preppers.

In mid-2018, I decided to give keto a try, so I shifted the focus of my weekly meal prep videos on Instagram to keto meals. I wanted to continue my Four-Week Meal Prep Challenges, but I wondered, What if I turn it into a really good book resource and beef it up with all the information that I regularly share online? I got to work and experimented with recipes, developed meal plans with complementary flavors, and created detailed game plans that I knew would make meal prepping easy to do. I came up with a deep-dive guide that explains the purpose of each section of the done-for-you plans.

If you came across this book because you’re interested in keto or meal prepping (or both!), I’d like to invite you to head over to my Instagram (@cookandsavor) to follow along with my Sunday weekly meal preps. Feel free to drop me a quick DM or comment on my latest post to say, Hey! and ask me any questions you have. I love one-on-one conversations, so don’t be shy! If we’re already connected on Instagram and you’re familiar with the recipes, videos, tips, and tricks that I’ve regularly been sharing there, I’m sure you’ll also enjoy cooking with Easy Keto Meal Prep!

MEAL PREP 411

Meal prepping is taking the time to cook the majority of your meals for the week ahead of time. Gone are the days of last-minute decisions about what to eat or feed the family for breakfast, lunch, or dinner because meal prepping puts nutrient-dense, ready-to-eat meals within arm’s reach.

Meal prepping not only saves you money but also allows you to spend more time with your family. And the chances that you’ll make unhealthy food choices will be slim to none!

I know you’ve been in a situation where you’re on your way home from work or school, exhausted and so hungry, with no clue what to eat for dinner. Your body wants to be fed, so you detour to the nearest fast-food joint to grab something because you MUST. EAT. NOW.

Let’s change that situation, shall we? What if you know that there’s food ready to be eaten as soon as you get home? You’re tired and hungry, yes, but you’re not in a panic trying to figure out what to eat; rather, you’re mentally picturing the inside of your refrigerator, trying to decide which home-cooked meal you will heat up and eat in less than five minutes. Because you know this, you find it easier to drive past that fast-food joint on your way home.

Why Is Meal Prepping Important?

Here are the top three reasons why meal prepping is important:

•It saves time.

•It saves money.

•It leaves less opportunity for you to make unhealthy food choices.

There’s just something about opening a fridge full of food that instantly makes you happy!

Other meal preppers have told me that they like meal prepping because they can spend more time with the family on weeknights and because they have more time to relax and decompress at the end of the day.

But Jenny, you might say, meal prepping takes a lot of time and work!

Why yes, yes it does. Unless you have a budget to buy ready-to-eat meals made with good-quality ingredients, such as the meals from Balanced Bites (and no, frozen TV dinners do not count!), or to hire someone to cook for you, you need to put in the work at the start of the week so you can reap the benefits of your efforts in the following days. Meal prepping requires an investment of time, but it’s time well spent. If you calculate the number of hours you cook each night to prepare that night’s dinner and meals for the following day, the total will be significantly more than the time you will spend during once-a-week or twice-a-week meal prep sessions.

My husband, Will, and I both work our regular jobs, all day, Monday to Friday. He gets home around 4:00 p.m. I get home even later—closer to 6:00 p.m. By the time I walk in the door, we’re both hungry, but we’re not stressed about what to eat because we prepped our meals the Sunday before. We take a minute or two to decide what’s for dinner, heat up our plates, and then it’s chow time. These premade meals are a huge help on the weeks Will’s son, Diego, is with us. He’s usually hungry when Will picks him up after school. Instead of grabbing the usual burger and fries from In-N-Out or pizza from Pizza Hut to eat when he gets home, Will gives Diego a more nutritious snack, such as a chicken drumstick or pork chop with cut-up vegetables, to tide him over until dinnertime. Diego doesn’t eat keto, so I have a few of his simple go-to meals prepped and ready for him.

Not only does our family eat well but we also save money each month because we prepare 90 percent of our meals at home, but we still enjoy a meal out once a week. As you get into meal prepping, you may notice that you’ll spend a little more on groceries than you did before, but you don’t need to worry. The amount you spend as you meal prep still will be significantly less than what you’d spend on the combination of groceries, fast food, and eating out multiple times each week. For our family of two adults and one child, our weekly grocery bill is around $150. We do most of our shopping at Trader Joe’s and grab one or two specialty items at Whole Foods. Eating ethically sourced, humanely raised meat from grass-fed and pasture-raised animals is very important to us, so we also subscribe to a monthly meat delivery box from Moink for $159. Our grocery bill comes out to $759 a month for three meals a day plus snacks for six or seven days a week. Breaking this down even more, that amounts to $25 each day and $8 per meal.

COMPARE THIS:

In my area, a Combo #2 Cheeseburger Meal from In-N-Out Burger for one person costs almost $7. A meal-prepped meal that serves three to four people is only $8!

When Should You Meal Prep?

Now that I’ve convinced you that meal prepping will be beneficial, you may be wondering when is the most appropriate time to get it done. There’s no set day to meal prep; it depends on your home or work schedule and when you can most easily carve out some time. The majority of people (including me) meal prep on the weekend, usually on a Sunday, so the food is good through the rest of the work or school week. If you have different weekends or work shifts, pick the day that’s most convenient for you.

If you’re just starting, you may want to split the work between two days by including a midweek meal prep day, such as Wednesday. That way, you’re not cooking as much in a single day, which can make it feel like a chore. For each of the four weekly done-for-you plans, I’ve included two approaches: Cook Once a Week and Cook Twice a Week. As you get more comfortable with meal prepping, you can switch from two meal prep days to just one. On the other hand, if you typically cook once a week but find yourself with a shorter-than-usual time window to do your meal prep for the week ahead, you can switch to twice a week. I’ve made the plans flexible enough for you to choose what works best for you.

If you’re more experienced and you want free rein on which entrée and side dish to combine to create a meal for yourself and your family each day, you can download a blank template from easyketomealprep.com and create a DIY plan using the recipes included with each week.

Meal Planning vs. Meal Prepping

The terms meal planning and meal prepping sometimes are used interchangeably, which can get confusing because the two things seem the same, but they’re not. Meal planning is the precursor to meal prepping; it’s the process of determining which recipes to cook for which meals and then coming up with a grocery list before you head to the store. After this phase comes the execution part, which is meal prepping. Cutting, chopping, sautéing, baking, and stir-frying meals one after the other, or sometimes at the same time, happens as a result of good meal planning.

If you’re no stranger to meal planning, you know it can take some time depending on how many recipes you plan to cook. Sometimes you’ll get stuck in a rut trying to come up with ideas while browsing online and even while going through your tried-and-true recipes, which leaves you feeling frustrated because nothing is jumping out at you. When my brother and I were kids, my mom would always ask us on Saturday mornings before she went to the market what dishes we wanted to eat during the week, and we’d both give her that deer-in-the-headlights look because we couldn’t think of anything. Thankfully, my mom is pretty savvy, so she’d always come up with yummy meals for us after going through her recipe notebook and checking out what was on sale. Meal planning can be time-consuming, but it’s worth the effort because doing it right will help you be able to meal prep successfully.

Fear not; I’ve done four weeks’ worth of meal planning for you, so you don’t have to worry about anything. Review each week’s meal plan, shop for groceries, and then get your meal prep on!

BUILDING A KETO PLATE

Easy Keto Meal Prep does not dive deep into the details of what keto is all about because there are so many books already available. This book is designed to simplify the keto diet and make it more sustainable for you to follow by providing weekly meal plans that follow a ketogenic template. If you want to read more about keto, I recommend checking out a couple of books in the Recommended Products, Brands, and Resources section (here).

In a nutshell, the ketogenic, or keto, diet involves consuming high amounts of fat, moderate amounts of protein, and low amounts of carbohydrates. This division of nutrients enables your body to burn fat as fuel rather than burning carbohydrates and sugar as you would if you followed other types of diets. When you are burning fat for fuel, you are said to be in ketosis.

Do you find yourself trying to figure out how to build a keto plate without meticulously counting or weighing your food? Follow this three-step approach, which has worked really well for me:

1. Start with 3 to 5 ounces of fatty protein (a palm-sized portion).

2. Add one serving of low-carb vegetables (2 cups light leafy greens or 1 cup cooked veggies).

3. Add one serving of fat (about 1 tablespoon).

If you still feel hungry after eating a meal, your body is signaling you that it needs a little more fat. Add an extra serving of fat when necessary, and you’ll notice that you feel satisfied. Once your body has adapted to getting the majority of its calories from fat, there will be times when you’ll feel like you don’t need to eat as much food, so adjust your intake accordingly. Don’t think that you need to eat specific quantities at every meal. Keep modifying to figure out what works best for you!

MEAL PREPPING WHILE EATING A KETO DIET

What Is Keto Flu?

Transitioning your body into a fat-burning machine when it always has been fueled by carbohydrates takes a little bit of time. You will feel lethargic, fuzzy, and irritable at first, and you might even get headaches, as if your body is fighting off a bug. However, these symptoms mean you’re not getting enough electrolytes, such as sodium. To help remedy this shortfall, hydrate with a pitcher of refreshing Citrus Electrolyte Drink (here) until you’re feeling normal again.

If you’re currently eating keto, you may be used to drinking your breakfast in the form of a hearty cup of butter coffee (and that’s okay if that works for you), but you won’t find butter coffee in any of the weekly meal plans in Easy Keto Meal Prep. I want you to be able to sit down, chew your food, enjoy it, and appreciate the feeling of satiety you get from polishing off a filling breakfast.

I loved the way I felt once my body was in ketosis and burning fat, but boy, was it a rough couple of weeks when I first started! Headaches, brain fog, and fatigue were my top three keto