Meal prep is the process of making multiple meals at the same time to store and eat later.

Making your meals in advance has several advantages. You will avoid the pitfalls of waiting until you are hungry to decide what to eat, which could involve an entire pan of Rice Krispies Treats. You will also save time by prepping your entire week’s meals in just two hours. For more advantages of meal prep, click here: Why Meal Prep.

Everyone does meal prep a little differently because everyone has different dietary goals. However, the same basics steps define almost all meal-prep routines. We call these steps “The 5 Moves.”

The 5 Moves are:

1. Shop
2. Chop
3. Sprinkle
4. The Almighty “Poke”.
5. Plate

Read more here: Our Approach to Meal Prep.

We recommend spending two hours of active cooking time once per week. This can save you as many as eight hours of a cooking time (or eating out time) per week, for a net gain of six free hours each week.

Yes. Meal prep works with any diet in the same way that cooking works with any diet. Your dietary preferences are handled in the first move: Shop. What you shop for is what you eat, plain and simple.

Meal prep works with:

• Paleo
• Vegan
• Vegetarian
• Gluten free
• Low sodium
• Low calorie
• Low fat
• Low carb
• No carb
• Slow carb
• DASH
• Mediterranean
• Locavore
• Blood type
• Diabetes
• High blood pressure
• Food allergies
• All of the above

The more restrictive your diet, the more valuable pre-made meals become. The world might not be set up to accommodate your diet, but your kitchen can be.

You need to master meal prep more than anyone! This program puts you in complete control of what you put into your meals, the serving sizes, the amounts of fats, sugars, sodium, and the like. Your doctor or dietician should provide you with the do’s and don’ts of what you can and cannot eat. Apply those to your meal prep and monitor your medical indicators closely.

You can family-size your meal-prep practice in the same way you can family-size anything you cook. In a best-case scenario you would involve family members in the process, but this is not always possible. Read more here: Family-Sizing It.

No. Instead of giving you recipes, we give you something even better: A five-step process that allows you to create and season your own meals without ever using another recipe. This allows you to have complete freedom and control when preparing and cooking meals, and you will learn it in our lesson: Breaking Free of Recipes

No problem. We show you how to customize your shopping lists and meal plans to eliminate and replace any type of food you don’t eat.

You can cook, and you can cook well. All you need are The 5 Steps of Cooking which you learn in the very first week. Whether you are a James Beard Award winner or the family cook, these five things are guaranteed to make your everyday meal taste great.

Your meals will last five days, and we will teach you how to eat them in such an order that everything tastes fresh and delicious.

The important thing to remember with pre-made meals is that you are not cooking them again. You are simply heating them up to a temperature you enjoy. You can do that with the oven, toaster oven, stovetop, microwave, or car dashboard.

You will also learn to make cold dishes like salads, wraps, pastas, and even soups that you can enjoy without cooking.

Pre-made meals are different than leftovers in that they have not been picked through and half- eaten. They are complete meals that happen to live in the refrigerator until you are ready to eat them. to get heated up. Also, there are a lot of cold dishes like salads, wraps, cold pastas and cold soups that you can enjoy without reheating. If the alternative is eating take-out, you will be doing your body a huge favor to get past your mental roadblock about eating homemade meals that have been sitting in the refrigerator.

That is entirely up to you. Kitchen Karate is not a diet program. We don’t tell you what to eat: We show you how to prep meals quickly using the ingredients of your choosing. That said, whenever you make meals with whole fresh ingredients rather than processed foods, you are creating nutritionally dense meals.

In general, well-balanced meals made from whole fresh ingredients pack 300-600 calories for women and 500 – 800 calories for men. That said, you can weigh and measure your foods before prepping them to get a more exact read on your caloric intake.

Prices vary widely depending on where you shop, how many people are in your family, how many bulk items you are buying, and whether you eat meat. You can prep meals for as little as $2 a plate or for as much as $8 per plate. The average Kitchen Karate practitioner spends around $5 per plate for a single person and around $12 per meal for a family of four.

The Kitchen Karate approach to meal prep uses basic, everyday equipment, most of which you have already. However, you will need more of certain items than you are used to. Take a look at our Tool Checklist.

We have a few rules—five, to be exact. For instance, you must measure by hand, and you must cook without recipes. You will learn the other three rules along the way, as well as why they are all necessary to release your inner chef!

To use the Cook-Along videos you will need a mobile device (laptop, tablet, smartphone) with an internet connection that works in your kitchen.

If this video plays in your kitchen, you should be all set.

Try turing the HD off on the video. (You can toggle between HD and non-HD by pressing the blue HD button on the video player.)

No. You can access all the materials and Cook-Along videos using a regular web browser.

No. The videos are streaming. You will need to be connected to the internet to watch them.

Yes. As long as you are connected to the internet, you can re-watch, rewind, pause and play the videos whenever you want.

The Cook-Along videos are the equivalent of watching 2 hour movies. Your best bet is connect via wifi and not through your cell phone carrier, unless you have unlimited data usage in your plan.