Instead of spending your Sunday’s vegging out, watching football and sleeping try to spend your day getting in the healthy mindset for the rest of the week. Get out your tupperware and start planning your meals for the week ahead.

Moving into an apartment at college can be difficult. It’s not easy to go to the grocery store and avoid buying all the junk food you set your eyes on, but by starting food preparation, you can easily plan out your meals for the whole week. Not only does it make your week more organized, but it helps develop healthy eating habits for the rest of the year.

To accomplish a successful food prepping week beings with grocery shopping for the right food and ingredients for every single meal. This involves planning what you will be eating every single day for the rest of the week. Write down what you will be eating for breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner. Then breakdown the list of ingredients you need to make those meals happen. When planning your week, it’s also important to think about food that won’t go bad over the course of the week and will be able to sit in your fridge.

If this is your first time with meal prep, it could be easier to only do a few days at a time until you feel confident prepping for the whole week. By doing this in the beginning of the week, you’re able to see everything you’ll be consuming.

Prepping your food can be done in so many different ways and you have to find the things that work for your tastes. With meal prep, you’ll be able to experiment new recipes and incorporate different varieties into each day so you aren’t getting bored of what you are eating. Switching up what you’re cooking with for the week can make meal preps more fun and a little more adventurous

Obviously, when you meal prep through the whole week, it’s going to take a while to get all your food cooked for the week. Whether you want to get it done all at once or only do a few days at a time, there is always going to be time that you have to dedicate towards the meal prep.

The benefits of meal prep are endless. One of the main benefits is saving time for the rest of the week by preparing your food early. Even though it takes a lot of time to prep for the week, it takes the time off from cooking the rest of the week. As college students, it’s not abnormal to be so busy you have to sacrifice a meal or two, but with food preparation, you’ll already have your dinner prepared for you on those days you don’t have time to cook.

Not only are you saving time, but you’ll also be able to see exactly how many calories you are putting into your body on a daily basis. If you’re focused on muscle gain or weight loss, you can see how many calories you have going and going out of your body. You’ll also have more insight into portion control have food prep. It’s not hard to eat way more than what your food portion should be, but when you prep your meals for the week, you’ll be less likely to overeat.

Meal prep can be different for each person. It takes trial and error to find the way that best fits your lifestyle, whether it’s doing prep for the whole week, half the week or finding a completely new way to do it. By experimenting with food prep and finding what works for you, you’ll be on your way to living a healthy, more organized lifestyle.