The summer season brings out a few things in us: An urgent desire to wear as little clothing as possible, numerous weather discussions, and a sudden panic of how we look with less clothes on.

But let’s be perfectly honest and admit that we can also get lazy when the sun hits us and food prep becomes a distant memory, especially when BBQs, ice cream, and beer gardens are temptations your body could do without.

This then brings us on to the emotional love/hate relationship we have with healthy, clean food – and how we can get through the summer eating said food with ease. When it comes to sticking to a meal plan, we’ve heard the usual ‘it’s too much effort’, ‘I don’t have time’, or simply ‘I forgot’ excuses to not eat well or not be prepared to eat well.

Now we’ll be perfectly honest, and respond to those excuses with a ‘man the hell up’ – but we’ll also give you the tools and knowledge to change your lifestyle and allow you to manage your clean eating whilst juggling the rest of your personal life. Exercising is of course paramount to achieving real physical transformation; but without a genuine commitment to a healthy diet, you’re going to be holding yourself back from the best possible result. Adhering to a food plan is always going to be down to how bad you really want to make a change.

To help make that change a little easier, we’ve put together five food preparation tips to help you make a successful summer transformation:

Buy Your Meat In Bulk

Buying your protein in bulk makes clean eating much more cost-effective, and can save you plenty of time. Once you’ve bought your meat, weight it, season it, bag it, and whack it straight in the freezer until you need it to be cooked. Job done.

Disposable Tupperware

If you’re really struggling for time, buying disposable Tupperware can mean less time spent on dishwashing – and more time out in the sun.

Cook Once A Day

Prep all of your meals in one go, and have it ready in your throw-away Tupperware for when meal time comes around. Look at your own schedule and figure out what works for you. If making all of your meals after cooking dinner the night before does it for you, GREAT!  Over the course of a week, this will save you hours in cooking time.

Tools

Buy yourself a vegetable chopper or spiralizer to make chopping your veggies much more time-efficient, and your greens will be chopped and prepped in no time.

And if you really are a stickler for saving time and don’t own a blender yet? Well, what on earth have you been doing?

Slow Cook

If time really is limited whilst you’re awake, buy yourself a slow cooker, throw all of your ingredients in, and leave to cook overnight – this way, your food prep is literally happening whilst you sleep. Buy yourself a thermos flask, and you’ll have warm food for the rest of the day.

When UP Founder Nick Mitchell was competing as a bodybuilder and learning to be a barrister at the same time, he used to sneak soft drink bottles filled with whey protein, milk, eggs, bananas, and ground nuts into Court with him. What’s your excuse?!

Visit Chris’s page to find out more about his Personal Training Singapore work.

_{This post was first published on UP Fitness blog and has been reposted on Connected Women with the permission of the author.
Edited by Michelle Sarthou 
Image credit: Shutterstock
Reference: achieving real physical transformation}

Did you enjoy this post? Please comment, like and share!