Tips for Meal Prepping Without It Consuming All Your Time

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When you get serious about your fitness goals, one first step is usually to get your nutrition in order. You want to get enough protein to support your muscles, fruits and vegetables for health, carbs for fuel, and a total amount of calories that supports your activity and your goals without undereating or overeating.

Planning your meals in advance, often referred to as "meal prepping," can be incredibly beneficial. Rather than pondering over lunch choices, you simply take a container from the refrigerator and warm up the prepared food. This level of convenience is hard to match, and meal prepping ensures you adhere to your dietary goals. While a bodybuilder may find his daily chicken and broccoli routine monotonous, he appreciates the consistent protein intake without needing to think about it. (Rest assured, your meals will be far more delicious!)

But meal-prepping has its pitfalls. Maybe you will get bored with your meals. Or maybe you won’t even get that far, and you’ll burn out just from the mental and physical effort of cooking a whole week’s meals at once. With that in mind, here are some beginner tips to ease into the process with your sanity intact.

Find your favorite breakfast option.

Before we start prepping anything, let’s start planning. Most of us are fine with eating the same breakfast every day, and there’s a good chance you already have a few favorite breakfasts that you can throw together quickly before you’ve fully woken up.

So, your first step is to come up with a breakfast that fits your macros and that is easy to prepare. We’re taking baby steps here, so don’t worry too much about prepping this ahead of time. Just make sure that it will be ready when breakfast time arrives.

For example, maybe your breakfast is yogurt and fruit. That’s easy enough: Buy some yogurt and buy some fruit. In the morning, you can put the two together. Or you can make something the night before to grab on your way out the door. A smoothie in a jar is perfect—just shake it in the morning and it's ready to drink. (Don't use ice, since ice melts, but frozen fruit is fine.) Or for another option, I like to make Bircher muesli two servings at a time, since each calls for half an apple. So on Sunday night, I’ll prep jars for Monday and Tuesday. On Tuesday night I’ll make another pair.

Keep your takeout containers for future use.

When you start packing up dinners and lunches, you’ll need something to put them in. While cute little bento-esque Tupperwares may look nice, you may decide you don’t actually want all those divided containers. Or the boxes you buy may turn out to be the wrong size once you start filling them. Save money and time by selecting one or two types of takeout container that you get plenty of, and save those whenever you get them. I like the flat rectangular ones and the round one-pint soup containers.

Once you've figured out what you like, I'll admit there is a convenience to buying yourself some containers. Here's a fresh 50-pack of those rectangle containers, to save you from having to eat 50 takeout meals first. And if, unlike me, you enjoy packing lunches bento-style, you can get divided containers. (I like eating bento lunches, but it's work to come up with something to fill each compartment. Much easier to make a one-pot dish that fills the container by itself.)

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