Hey there, my friend, it’s Dr. Anthony Balduzzi, and welcome to today’s episode. Today, we’re going to talk about healthy meal-prep ideas for weight loss. So, if you’re… someone out there who wants to reduce your body weight and lose some fat, you know that nutrition is the key. And when it comes to nutrition, the key is to make it simple so you can follow through. And be consistent, because it doesn’t help to go on some fad diet and be on a rigid plan, and then fall off track and regain all the weight. So what I want to do today is bring you into my kitchen.
And run through some of my favorite go-to foods, go-to meals that are great for weight loss, energy, and even muscle building, quite frankly. And the way we’re gonna structure this episode is I’m gonna bring you through breakfast, lunch, a healthy snack, and dinner ideas. And I’m going to ask you some reflection questions as we go, to get you thinking about which you can incorporate into your help and which are practical. I know you’re going to learn a ton, so get out some pen and paper, take some notes, and let’s dive in. All right, so let’s get into today’s episode on some healthy meal prep ideas for weight loss.
And I want to run through a whole day because it makes sense to think about how we go through a day. The first thing I think… Please think about this: when you wake up in the morning, before we talk about food, you need to rehydrate. And this means you get 20 to 32 ounces of high-quality water. And when I say high-quality water, ideally, it’s nice and filtered, and you can add a pinch of pink Himalayan sea salt or other minerals. You drink that within 30 minutes of getting up. Bodies need water to get energy production going, and I would like you to drink water before you have coffee or any other food.
Now, you may have heard the buzz around intermittent fasting, the idea that you don’t necessarily need to eat in the morning. And that’s true. And I’m a big proponent of doing things like fasting if it works in your schedule. However, I still want to talk about breakfast because whether you have it at, let’s say, six, seven, eight o’clock, or if you shift that first meal back to around 10, 11, 12, this is still gonna be relevant. And when it comes to breakfast and starting your day, you need to make it super simple. And here are a couple of meals that I absolutely love. One of my favorite go-to breakfasts that doesn’t require much meal prep is making a high-quality protein shake.
All you need is a blender. You need a high-quality protein powder. So this is our fit father version of super fuel. It’s a whey protein powder. We also have plant-based versions, but you wanna get a protein powder that has around 20 to 25 grams of protein. Per scoop, it’s low in sugar and ideally has other good nutrients, like probiotics, vitamins, and minerals, like ours. But you throw about a scoop and a half of protein. You can throw in about 1 to 2 tablespoons of chia and hemp seeds. A little bit of almond milk or dairy milk, if you like. Some wild frozen berries. You can blend up a delicious shake.
And one of the reasons that protein shakes are so good in the morning is that they take a little bit of time, like five minutes. They keep you very full. They don’t experience much digestive stress. So consistent with it. So, if you’re a busy parent running around prepping your kids for the day and getting ready to go out to work, you can blend up a shake and get amazing nutrition. You don’t need to think about it. Automatic. So I’m a huge fan of protein shakes. And if you ever join any of our Fit Father or Fit Mother programs, we give you a bunch of different shake recipes and smoothie recipes using some great ingredients. They’re super delicious. It becomes addictive because you have such a good routine.
Now, another easy breakfast recipe is making eggs. So I have a couple of options here, and I’ll show you this closer on-screen. I just took three eggs, and they are high-quality. You can see the yolk, it’s orangish. And these are sunny side up. I just put a little butter in a pan, and I fried these things up. I put it on a side of some sprouted microgreens, had some leftover green beans from the night before, and had a little piece of Ezekiel bread toast. So this meal doesn’t take very long to make—I mean, just making some eggs. It takes like five minutes to make something like this. Eggs are a phenomenal, phenomenal breakfast food.
They’re high in protein, high in healthy fats, and high in the choline that fuels your brain. So when I’m thinking about a healthy breakfast, it’s either a shake or some eggs, or, as a final option, I recommend making overnight oats. And this is great for you if you’re following more of a plant-based, vegan, or vegetarian lifestyle. What you can do is get some organic rolled oats. You can throw it in a little Mason jar overnight with hemp seeds, chia seeds, and almond milk, and let it soak. And in the morning, you have this delicious oatmeal that’s rich in all these vitamins, minerals, fiber, and protein. You can throw a scoop of some peanut butter on there, and you have a nice, simple, quick, and easy meal.
The main thing I want you to say right now and think about is that breakfast needs to be standardized. Please think: pick one or two go-to options, and nail it every single day, because when you’re consistent with breakfast, you’re gonna carry that momentum into lunch, snack, and dinner, and this whole wheel of positive momentum churns in your life. So shakes, eggs, overnight oatmeal, or even leftovers from dinner the night before are great breakfast options. Now, in between breakfast and lunch, I want you to focus on hydrating. Don’t snack. Allow your body to have eaten the foods, digest them, and stabilize blood sugar. Now around. Four or five hours later, you might be heading out to lunch.
Now, how can we make lunch simpler and more consistent? There are a couple of great things. The first thing is you can get a salad base of any salad you like, spring mix, romaine, whatever, and you can throw some protein on top. So I have a really simple meal here. I have a little bit of grass-fed ground beef that I made up here on a bed of romaine lettuce with peppers. This is a super easy, simple meal that doesn’t take much. How do you do this? Well, what we did the night before waswas pan-fry a little bit of grass-fed ground beef with some taco seasoning. And we had a little bit of these peppers that we just chopped up and sautéed right over there.
And you throw this on a bed of lettuce. This takes under 5 minutes to make after a bit of prep. So, if you have these things sitting in your fridge, whether it’s a chicken breast you cooked, or if you’re following a vegan or vegetarian option, you can do some tempeh or something like this. Throw this on greens; you can always do salad and greens. And what’s cool about this idea of lunch, of doing greens and some is that even if you’re eating out, let’s say, if you’re on the go and you need to go to some fast food chain, you can do this basically anywhere. You can go to McDonald’s and get a chicken salad. You could go to Chipotle and get a base of some salad with some protein on top.
So for lunch, please think about getting a good base of greens with some protein on top that’s gonna keep you full, and very healthy. A couple of other phenomenal lunch options that don’t require much meal prep are making a high-quality sandwich. So all I did here is like have some Ezekiel bread. You toast this. It actually tastes quite good. I put in some sprouts, some turkey, and some mustard. You could throw in a little avocado and pesto. This sandwich is gonna be under 400 calories, loaded with fiber, protein, healthy fats, greens, so many vitamins and minerals. It’s amazing and super convenient. You can take this on the go. And literally, no prep was required for this.
You have the pieces of bread you toast, and you throw the already-cooked meat on there, or whatever you throw on there. Easy. If you’re following a vegan vegetarian plan, you could make this with… some high-protein peanut butter and toasted Ezekiel bread. Throw a cup in, then add 4 tablespoons of peanut butter. Spink some hemp seeds on there for some extra protein and healthy fats. Amazing, easy. Didn’t require basically any prep whatsoever. Other things that are really good for lunch are leftovers from dinner. And when we get to dinner, I’m going to talk about this concept of a perfect plate. This is what a perfect plate framework looks like. Half of your plate is going to be some veggie you love, a quarter is some kind of protein, and a quarter is some healthy carbs or healthy fats.
For lunch, you can use leftovers from the night before. So you can see how this whole framework starts to stack on itself. It’s really convenient. But typically, for me, Ezekiel bread sandwich, leftovers from the night before, or some protein salad is exactly what I’m looking for. Now, snack. Snacks aren’t necessary, but many people get in trouble between lunch, around noon, and dinner, around five or six o’clock. To be a long stretch. And if you don’t eat anything, you go into dinner starving, and you may overeat or eat the wrong foods, or you don’t have a good plan, and then you snack on crappy foods, or your blood sugar gets out of control.
So I like to give people options for a healthy snack around two or three o’clock to take the edge off—a couple of convenient things that are really good for meal-prepping healthy snacks. One is hard-boiled eggs. Whether or not you have eggs in the morning, you can basically make some hard-boiled eggs. Very easy to do. You boil these things on the stove top, and you can make a dozen hard-boiled eggs in under 15 minutes, and they’re just there, you can have those. You can pair those with a little bit of cheese if dairy feels fine for you. I have some raw goat cheddar that you can pair with some eggs. That is a high-protein, healthy fat snack that’s super good.
Other ideas for snacks that I love are getting some high-quality nuts. These are some macadamia nuts. I love macadamia nuts, walnuts, and pistachios. You can get around a third cup of these and pair it with a piece of fruit, like an apple. This is an amazing snack, non-perishable, no meal prep required. You have to have this stuff around the house. Other things you can do, if you’re the kind of person who likes bars, you can buy some high-quality protein bars. I have a plant-based one from Garden of Life here. I have a GoMacro bar over here that’s good. You can also get a high-quality protein yogurt. So I have Chobani Greek yogurt, and you could throw in some berries.
So are any of these bells ringing for you as foods that you like? Please think about what your go-to healthy foods are, and when you figure those out, buy them in bulk and keep them around the house. And so far, outside of really liking the eggs, and maybe the grass-fed beef or the protein that was on top of the salad here for lunch, no cooking is really required, right? This is very simple, easy stuff you can think about. When it comes to dinner, we need to be more strategic with our prep. And I brought up this idea of a perfect plate. I want to show it to you again. To make a perfect plate, decide which healthy veggies you love—what are your go-tos?
What are the go-to proteins that you love? What are the go-to healthy carbs that you love? And what are the healthy fats that you love? And you prep those things in bulk. And I want to show you a couple of perfect plate meals that fit this bill. This is the first one here. I have some grass-fed ribeye, which we just literally cooked in the oven. And then we finished on a cast-iron skillet. So this is not too hard to make. You can make this stuff in. We just sliced this up. We made it the day before. We used a pressure cooker to make some of these squashes. So this is a delicious squash. And to be really simple, we threw it on the side of some greens.
So there you go—really easy, perfect plate. If you like beef, this would be something you’d really love. Here’s a seafood-based perfect plate. We have some Cajun shrimp that you can grill or bake with seasoning. You buy some high-quality wild shrimp, season these puppies up. We have some roasted vegetables and some Brussels sprouts. There’s some sweet potato in here, some acorn squash. And then we mix this with a little bit of long-grain white rice. So this is a perfect plate. This works really well. And again, if you make this in bulk for dinner, you cook more dinner, you’re always gonna have leftovers for lunch. Another perfect plate that’s really simple and a lot of people would like is a spicy chicken breast dish.
So, chicken breasts on the grill again, and white rice, which we made in a rice cooker. We had some steamed broccoli, a little avocado for healthy fats, and I drizzled a little hot sauce on it. These are simple meals. And if you start thinking about this for dinner, and you’re prepping your go-to. And proteins in bulk, you’re gonna be in great shape. So, for my family and me, we have red meat once or twice a week. So either make that grass-fed taco seasoning, so we have a taco night, and we cook up a bunch of that ground beef, or we’ll make a ribeye steak, that’s great. Another night per week, we’ll make up some chicken, or I’m sorry, some chicken or some wild salmon.
And we typically do that in the oven. So you just put in more than you need for dinner, load it up, and bake. This stuff is in the oven. Now you have a bunch of leftovers you can use for lunch and for dinner that day. And when it comes to healthy carbs, personally, I like sweet potatoes, squash, or rice. And the way to do that is really easy: get yourself a rice cooker. So I have a big one here. So you get one of these, invest in a rice cooker. Oh my gosh, make it so easy. You can actually make vegetables and rice in there. You put it on, and you can make great healthy carbs.
The other really good thing is using something like a pressure cooker, like an Instapot. We made all of these. It just fell apart here. But we put some of these squashes here in the Instant Pot. And they’re so soft, it takes around 10 minutes. So you can make these healthy carbs in the Instant Pot super easily with pressure cooking. And so… That’s really the concept here. The idea here is to figure out your go-to healthy foods. It does not require a ton of prep. And if you’re a person who wants to do zero cooking, you could go. Through a zero-cooking day of a healthy meal for weight loss, you could do a shake in the morning for lunch.
You could buy some pre-cooked chicken breast or something like that, or even some canned salmon or canned sardines. I have some tinned wild sardines that are so healthy for you. You could throw that on top of some greens. Requires no cooking. For a snack, you could have some jerky, some nuts, or a piece of fruit. And for dinner, you could do any of these other things. You could even make an Ezekiel bread sandwich for dinner with pre-cooked turkey and avocado. The idea is that you need to find your go-to healthy foods. So my reflection question for you is this: what are your or your family’s go-to healthy foods in the form of proteins, healthy carbs, fibrous vegetables, and healthy fats?
When you identify those, you go to the grocery store, buy those foods, and then start creating a meal plan that basically works like this. If you want more direct help with this, or if you want everything laid out in a very simple way, do this: here are some recipes. Then I recommend you check out our free meal plans, which are linked in the description. We have those for Fit Fathers, Fit Mothers, and our fully paid program. And our paid program obviously includes the full nutrition plan, the full Fit Father and Fit Mother recipe book, all the workouts, and coaching for my team and me. So that’s the best option if you want to get very serious about weight loss.
But even from this free video, you probably have some good ideas on things to start incorporating. And my final little bit of tips to wrap this up. If you take one thing away from this video, I want you to nail your first meal of the day. Nail breakfast. Make it consistent. Make it high protein. Get either the shakes, the eggs, or something like that. Because when you start being consistent with breakfast, that momentum is going to carry forward. And it’s going to be so much more motivating for you to eat healthy the rest of the day. Thank you, my friend. I hope you found this video valuable and that you got some ideas for healthy meal prep for weight loss. This is Dr. Anthony Balduzzi signing off. Please check out those free meal plans in the description. I’ll see you around our channels, and I’ll talk to you very soon.
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