Struggling with your eating habits? Then perhaps it’s time to consider meal kits as part of your overall dietary changes.
Meal kits are services that provide weekly deliveries of fresh pre-portioned ingredients and recipe cards, often for a similar price that you’d pay at the grocery store.
They’re quickly becoming more popular worldwide, with the largest (HelloFresh) serving more than 2 billion meals in the last 5 years (source: Food Box Mate).
If you’re looking to lose weight, or simply adjust to a healthier diet, there are 4 key ways that meal kits can help you on your journey:
- Pre-defined portions.
- Guarantees balanced meals.
- Enforces consistency.
- Avoids takeaways.
I’ll share with you the reasons meal kits have transformed my diet and why I’d recommend them to anyone who’s trying to build healthier habits.
Before I dive into the first reason, it’s important to say that meal kits don’t feel like a traditional fad diet.
They’re meals using healthy, farm-to-table ingredients that feel far more sustainable than any diet I’ve ever been on before. There are loads of additional benefits too.
Eating pre-portioned meals
When ordering meal kits, you’re subscribing to a specific number of portions per dinner. Most commonly, that’s either 2 or 4 portions.
When your box of ingredients arrives, each recipe has just the right amount of food you need to serve the number of portions you ordered. This makes it super easy to know how much a “single portion” should look like.
Over time, this has really helped me understand what a standard portion of different types of meals look like.
I’ve also found that meal kits have prevented me from over-eating as I need to stop at the end of my portion.
I try not to keep any additional food in the house, so my stomach has slowly become accustomed to healthier meal sizes. This has helped me even when eating meals outside of my weekly meal kit deliveries.
Enjoy balanced meals
I’ll be honest. My own cooking revolves around simple, quick meals made by dealing with as few ingredients as possible. This means I end up pairing a protein source with a carbohydrate source and calling it a day.
Working alongside a nutritionist helped me realize just how impactful this is on everything from my energy levels to my fiber intake.
Consistently using meal kits was the catalyst for developing a much wider repertoire of genuinely balanced meals.
Most services work with dietitians and health specialists to develop their recipes.
Whilst this doesn’t mean that every single recipe is a perfectly healthy meal, it does mean that each of your meals will have a good balance of carbs, protein, and legumes.
That’s absolutely critical for supporting a long-term healthy diet.
Build a consistent habit
I hate fad diets. They promise the world and they’re super exciting for a few weeks until inevitably they become boring and unsustainable. I’ve lost a few kg’s using different diets but I always find I put them straight back on again.
To lose weight, then keep it lost, consistency is key.
Meal kit dinners are just normal meals, using ingredients mostly available in your local supermarket. There’s no secret sauce (albeit there are sometimes secret spices!) with anything that’s delivered.
That means they can provide a huge amount of variety. Japanese one night, Mexican the next. You can travel to 5 different continents in one week. That’s a recipe for never getting bored.
Sure, you won’t see immediate massive weight loss. However, the fact you can use meal kits for years without ever getting bored means you can easily build consistent, long-term dietary habits.
Avoid the takeaway excuse
We’ve all been there. It’s a Thursday evening and it’s already been a long day. You check the fridge and there’s nothing you can quickly pull together.
However, there’s a takeaway menu on the fridge door (well… my vice is Uber Eats!) and it becomes an easy temptation.
The beauty of meal kits is that there will always be fresh ingredients ready to cook. No inspiration or planning ahead is needed. It’s simply a case of picking the recipe you want to cook and you’re good to go.
You’re also pushed to cook every meal by taking advantage of the ‘sunk cost’ concept.
That’s because you’ve already spent the money to buy the ingredients, so it would be a huge waste not to use them.
It’s the small, psychological factors that build up to a long-term, sustainable weight loss journey.
A step in the right direction
Meal kits won’t be the solution to your weight loss journey on their own. They only cover one meal a day and they’re not linked to a wider weight loss community, which plays a big role in long-term success.
However, meal kits like HelloFresh will help you build healthy habits that you can use forever.
It’s even worth switching out meal kits with more focused diet programs every couple of months to accelerate your weight loss journey.
Not all meal kits are equal, however, don’t get paralyzed by choice.
They all bring the same weight-loss benefits I’ve shared in the article, so it’s better to get started sooner rather than later.