10 Brilliant Space-Saving Hacks for Your Kitchen

Article posted in: Nutrisystem for Men
food storage

Whether you’re waiting on your third Nutrisystem shipment or you haven’t yet received your first, you still have time to reorganize your kitchen. Tell the truth—it’s been on your to-do list for a long time. Now’s the time to do it: You’re about to receive four weeks worth of food, and we’ve got some food storage hacks to make your life (and kitchen) more organized.

While your four weeks of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, desserts and snacks won’t take up as much room as regular groceries would—maybe two shelves, one in the pantry, one in the fridge or freezer—you’re going to want to arrange them so they’re easy to access and don’t wind up taking over space you need for your healthy Flex Meal ingredients.

Fortunately, most Nutrisystem food packages are small, easily stackable (like single-serve freezer meals in the supermarket), color-coded (yellow for breakfast, blue for lunch, red for dinner and purple for dessert) and, in the case of non-frozen foods, “soft canned” to seal in flavor and freshness so you don’t have to refrigerate them. Obviously, freezer meals need their own space in the freezer.

Here are 10 food storage tips to make your Nutrisystem weight loss experience even easier:

1. Purchase colorful plastic containers at your local grocery store, convenience store or dollar store, and store your food in the containers according to the designated meal colors. If you can’t find the right colors, you can also use stick-on letters (B, L, D) to indicate which meal is in which container. You can use these for your freezer meals too.

Plastic Containers

2. Put snacks in their own separate container.

3. Store some food at work. If you’re eating meals at your desk, keep some non-frozen meals there, along with some snacks to get you through the afternoon.

Work snacks

4. Do a little prep work on the weekends. If you bought fresh or frozen fruit and veggies for smoothies, blend them ahead of time and store them frozen in plastic bags in the freezer. If your produce is just for snacking, chop it up in advance, and portion it out into individual containers and store the bags in the shelves of your fridge door. Not only will you save space, you’ll also be prepared for the busy week ahead.

freezer bag

5. Have a side-by-side fridge and freezer? Unless it’s large, you may have less room in the freezer for your meals, so consider ordering more non-frozen meals that you can keep on a kitchen shelf.

Frozen food

6. Take advantage of the “air space.” Add a wire rack to your fridge or freezer so you have more room to store everything. This can also work on your pantry shelves.

7. No room for four weeks worth of food? Organize your food each week. Take Sunday night to plan your entire week’s worth of meals and keep those foods handy, while the rest are stored in the box in a closet or wherever you have space for them.

8. Repurpose storage elements you already have. Wicker baskets and plastic and metal stackable baskets and bins you might use for potatoes, onions or pantry overflow can be pressed into service for your Nutrisystem meals.

stackable bins

9. Get creative. Recruit any three-shelf serving carts, decorative (or simply functional) office file bins, under-bed storage containers, storage totes, even hanging sweater organizers that you already have.

storage

10. Find new homes for some of your kitchen items. You might be able to free up an entire drawer or shelf where you usually keep your foil, wax paper, plastic wrap and plastic bags by installing a couple of cheap plastic magazine racks on the inside door of your under-sink cabinet. Just use strong adhesive strips to attach them and you have the ultimate food storage hack.