Reclaim your evenings: A Busy Teacher’s Guide to Healthy Meal prep

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

What’s the hardest part about being a teacher?

Is it the pastoral worries and duties? Is it the workload, preparing for Parent’s Evening, or helping out at Open Evening? Is it being a Form Tutor?

For me, it’s wrapping things up on a Friday afternoon, books marked and ready to deliver feedback on, and going to the gym to wind down. It’s leaving, getting home, and turning to dread as I open the fridge, only to find empty shelves glaring back at me. 

Nothing to eat.

After a busy day at work, there’s nothing worse than having to put your thinking cap back on and deciding on what to buy and cook into something that’s delicious, filling and healthy.

Tall order.

Sometimes you’ll get back from work and want nothing more than to pop something into the microwave and collapse onto the couch. Or to order a takeaway and consume your body weight in burgers and curries. As teachers, we have to make so many decisions every day that, after teaching six lessons back-to-back, you’re done. You just want to be home and fed. It’s a phenomenon called decision fatigue.

What if there was another way? What if you could get everything done during the day and still have time to kill it in the kitchen?

Here’s how.

Audit your kitchen

Meal prep, at its core, needs to be managed through your usual time management strategies. If you’ve read any of my other posts on productivity, you should be pretty good at this by now. Like any other productivity method which you might use to get on top of your work, meal prepping is a skill to make time for. Something to practice and something to master. The first thing that you could to ensure you’ve got time for meal prep is blocking it into your Google Calendar. If you’d do the same for a meeting at work, there’s no reason to not pop this into your Calendar for making food. If you’re well-fuelled, you’re more likely to be able to kill it during the week.

Then, once you’ve made time for cooking, there’s something you’ll need to do before chopping even a single vegetable: audit your kitchen. You’re going to do this by applying the Eisenhower Matrix to your kitchen. Work out what needs doing and sorting, removing or adding to, to assess whether you’ve got everything that you need for making food efficiently and effectively. For those unfamiliar with the method, the Eisenhower Matrix is usually used in leadership, management and productivity systems. You draw up four quadrants, divided into:

  • Urgent and important
  • Urgent but not important
  • Important but not urgent
  • Neither urgent nor important

Anything that fits into category 1 should be done first, then category 2, followed by 3, and the 4th category can be deleted or delegated (or, in the kitchen’s case, probably put off until later).

If I audited my own kitchen, I’d say that urgent and important tasks include things like cleaning the kitchen, since you can’t really get anything done with dishes in the way. Important but not urgent would be to sharpen knives, as you can probably get by with how sharp they already are. Neither urgent nor important would be to buy a third chopping board – since it’s not really necessary right now. Spend ten minutes auditing your kitchen and acting on the urgent and important tasks, then come back here.

By the end of this process, you should have also done an important, but not urgent, job: simplify your cupboards. Nobody really needs highly specialised ingredients: keep the pantry simple to make decision-making faster during the week.

Batch cooking

The best way to prepare your meals is by batch cooking. This method involves cooking multiple meals, or multiple portions of one meal, all at once. So, rather than cooking a casserole for one, five times a week – you could cook 5 portions once a week. Eat one portion tonight, stick another in the fridge for tomorrow, and save the remaining 3 for later.

Do that for 3 meals and you’ve suddenly made 15 meals – or 3 weeks worth of midweek eating. Cutting out any mid-week cooking, and reducing it to simply heating a bowl of rice and reheating a portion of something frozen, is your quick step to success. Find out more about what I eat in a day as a teacher over here.

If you struggle with starting a batch cook, identify what your boss battle is – that’s the single thing that you’re finding the hardest to do. This is probably your most procrastinated task, like chopping a week’s worth of veggies for the giant chilli you’re about to make. Get that task done first and you’re halfway there. Still struggling with things like chopping? Consider whether it’s worth investing in tools which support this, such as an electric or handheld chopper. I got one recently and it’s hugely sped up my weekly meal prepping.

Still struggling? Gamify it: listen to a video game soundtrack to stay focused while prepping, or swap to your favourite show as background noise. I find a mixture of these so motivating for getting tasks like these done – done quickly and done well.

Or you might benefit from writing it all down. I do that in my Bullet Journal.

Themed menus

Sometimes, part of the problem is dedicating mental energy to planning what you’d like each day of the week. I make these decisions on a Sunday, and it can take a good chunk of time to work out what I’d like every day, often relying on inspiration to strike as a result of perusing pages and pages of cookbooks.

So, why not take away the problem entirely? Pick a theme for each day and stick to it, varying the contents of your dishes each week. So, Soup Monday, Taco Tuesday and Pasta Wednesday; but Monday this week could be chicken and vegetable soup, while Monday next week could be tomato soup. This should reduce the mental energy required to plan, making you more likely to stick to your goals of healthy eating.

Turn on your Teacher Brain

Having a takeaway isn’t bad if it’s done in moderation, but if you’re relying on this, not only will it eat away at your bank balance, it’ll also eat at your health and happiness.

Healthy, well-prepared and balanced meals can boost the release of serotonin in your brain, since you’ll feel accomplished, as well as preventing the dopamine crash of reaching for junk food when stressed. On top of that, if you’re meal prepping with friends or a partner, or sharing recipes with colleagues, this can help to release oxytocin, the feel-good chemical, which’ll only make you happy. That’s all ignoring the fact that certain foods will be more nourishing for the brain than others.

For more on how to hack your brain chemistry, check out this post, where I take a deep dive into the topic.

Remember, just like a lesson plan, your meal prep doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be flexible.

What’s your go-to lunch during the week? Let me know in the comments if you’d like insight into how I get mine ready each night.

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