Close-up of a woman holding a divided glass container filled with a prepped meal.

Back in 2013, when I originally posted on meal prepping, it was quite the novel concept! The idea hadnโ€™t quite taken off on Instagram yet, and people were blown away with how much easier it was to get healthy food on your plate with meal prep.

Now, meal prep is a pretty common tactic folks use to streamline their meals. There are tons of meal prep recipes, menus, and even services that provide entire meals for you for a week. Iโ€™m so excited to see so many people jumping on the meal prep bandwagon!

Side angle shot of Meal Prep Chicken Pad Thai with Sweet Potato Noodles packed into 3 glass lunch containers

So here, Iโ€™m updating my old โ€œHow to Meal Prepโ€ content with all the goodies Iโ€™ve learned over the past 5+ years of meal prepping, plus giving you an easy get-started primer if youโ€™re new to meal prep. I get that seeing those perfectly organized beautiful meals on Instagram or Pinterest can be mega-intimidatingโ€”and Iโ€™m here to tell you that meal prep doesnโ€™t have to be overwhelming or super time consuming. Weโ€™re going to make meal prep work for you!

Because some folks are better auditory and visual learners, you’ll notice in this post that I pulled all my favorite Meal Prep 101 Tips and Tricks into a short video to get you started. This definitely isn’t a deep dive into Meal Prepping, but it will give you enough info to get you going!

First up: Identify Your Meal Pain Points

It might be tempting to dive into meal prepping all your meals, but the truth is, most of us have at least one meal a day that is relatively โ€œeasyโ€ to get on the table. Maybe you head into work later, and breakfast is normally pretty easy for you to get going. Maybe you love cooking dinner as a family, so dinner is a joy to prepare! You donโ€™t really need meal prep help for those meals.

Instead, focus your meal prep efforts where itโ€™ll really count. For me, thatโ€™s primarily lunches and snacksโ€”I tend to get hyper-focused and forget (or choose not) to eat. Having food prepped and ready makes it super easy for me to get my midday meals in!

Woman in a striped shirt and purple cardigan smiling and eating vegetables, chicken, and berries out of a glass meal prep container.

You and your familyโ€™s meal habits will undoubtedly be different. Meal prep should be customized to whatโ€™s going on in your household! If breakfast is a struggle every morning, meal prep breakfast. If you love going out to lunch with your coworkers, donโ€™t worry about prepping lunch. If dinner is almost impossible to get done between shuttling kids to sports practices, then prep your dinner. Use meal prep to make your life easierโ€”YOUR life.

Next Up: Decide How You Want to Meal Prep

The key to making meal prep a regular part of your life is to figure out how to make it work with your schedule, your familyโ€™s needs, and your budget. There is no one right or wrong way to meal prep. I recommend using your first few weeks of meal prepping as trial-and-error time. What works? What doesnโ€™t? The first thing you need to play around with is picking which meal prep โ€œsystemโ€ works best for you.

Full Meal Prepping

The first kind of meal prepping is what you see soooo many Instagram photos about, and that is prepping full meals. This is where you pack a full meal into a divided container and stash it in the fridge for easy grab-and-go-meals all week long. (By the way, I have a great run-down of my favorite glass divided containers in this post.)

Meal Prep Healthy Veggie Stir Fry

The advantages to going this way are:

  • All the work is upfront, so when itโ€™s meal time, all you have to do is heat and eat. This is particularly helpful if you have a chaotic schedule that leaves little time for cooking during the work week.
  • Itโ€™s easy to individualize servingsโ€”smaller servings for kids, bigger for adults, etc.
  • If you are under a healthcare providerโ€™s prescribed diet, it simplifies things and makes it easier to ensure you have the required portions.

The disadvantages of full meal prepping are:

  • Itโ€™s easy to get bored because the meals are often exactly the same (there are ways around this, thoughโ€”like cooking multiple full meals in a week and sharing with family or friends).
  • It doesnโ€™t allow for the natural fluctuations in our bodiesโ€™ hunger from day-to-dayโ€”itโ€™s totally normal to be more hungry one day and less the next.
  • Since all the prep work is done ahead of time, meal prep time can be laborious.

Prepping Meal Elements

If full meal prepping doesnโ€™t seem up your alley, you might find success with prepping meal elements. This is where you take the items that you frequently use throughout the weekโ€”say, cooked chicken breastโ€”and instead of cooking them on the fly each time you need to cook a meal, you bulk cook the elements on your meal prep day, and then have it available for you to build meals from all week long.

Close-up of a woman holding glass containers. One is filled with zucchini noodles, and the other with sweet potato cubes.

The advantages to prepping elements are:

  • Tons of flexibility! You can mix, match, and combine elements to create almost endless possibilities.
  • A much shorter meal prep time, because you are just cooking individual foods instead of full meals.
  • Since nothing is pre-portioned, you can listen to the intuitive hunger cues in your body to determine how much food you should eatโ€”not the size of whatโ€™s in the container.
  • Many prepped elements can be frozen for later use if you end up cooking too much.

The disadvantages are:

  • It doesnโ€™t completely strip away your cook timeโ€”you still gotta get in the kitchen.
  • It can be hard to estimate exactly how much food you need, so you might have too much or too little at the end of the week.

A Combo of Both

Again, meal prepping is all about customizing what works for you, and what Iโ€™ve found is that a combo of prepping both full meals and meal elements works beautifully for me!

Meal prep components laid out in individual containers - roasted sweet potato cubes, salads in jars, muffins, egg cups, hard boiled eggs, hummus, and date bites.

I like to do a few full meals (like say, my Meal Prep Pad Thai or my Overnight Oats), but then I also supplement it with a few elements that can be used everywhere: roasted sweet potatoes, cooked chicken, cooked grains. It works well for me! That way I always have food ready to grab-and-go, but if I do have a little more time (or if Iโ€™m feeling bored), I can cook something quickly with the elements I have ready.

Glass containers filled with a week's worth of meal prep.

Make Your Prep List

Once you have figured out what (breakfast? lunch? dinner? snacks?) and how (full meals? elements? combo?) you can start to formulate your first prep list! Browse your favorite blogs (ahem, ahem) and check Pinterest for ideas that fit within your plan. If youโ€™re anything like me, youโ€™re probably super excited and ready to dive in with a list of 40 different preps. STOP RIGHT THERE. I donโ€™t want you to get overwhelmed.

Starting off, I recommend picking one item to help with each of your pain point meals. For me, this usually means picking one item for breakfast (Healthy Meal Prep Breakfast Sandwiches), one for lunches (Meal Prep Steak Fajita Bowls), and one for snacks (Hard Boiled Eggs). Does this cover all my food in the week? Heck no. But it does give me a nice buffer to fall back on when days get busy. And most importantly, my meal prep time doesnโ€™t take over my entire weekend. Dipping your toes in the meal prep waters is way more sustainable than diving head-first into the deep end.

Go ahead and write out those items you want to prep and make your grocery shopping list. Again, KEEP YOUR LIST SHORT, friends!

Pick Your Grocery Shopping and Prep Days

Now that youโ€™ve got your prep list, itโ€™s time to go shopping and pick your prep day. I usually recommend doing them on two separate datesโ€”shopping on Saturday and prepping on Sunday, for example, but if youโ€™re doing a small prep (WHICH YOU ARE, RIGHT?) you can probably get away with doing them both in the same day.

Once your preps get a bit more robust, I recommend splitting up the shopping and prepping daysโ€”itโ€™s just a recipe for exhaustion to try to do them on the same day! You can also get around this with grocery delivery or grocery pickup. Curbside pickup has made my prep days SO much easier!

Brunette woman in a teal shirt putting the lid on a glass container filled with zucchini noodles.

I recommend scheduling your prep day when you have little else going on. Actually pull out your calendar and circle the date! Itโ€™s a date with yourself and your healthโ€”donโ€™t stand yourself up.

Ready, Set, Prep!

When prep day comes, put on some comfy clothes and some good tunes, and then set yourself a timer. Yes, a timer! Again, the key to meal prep being sustainable is for it to not take over your life. So before you prep each time, I highly recommend sitting with yourself for a few minutes and asking this question, โ€œHow much am I willing to devote to this today?โ€ Some days, the answer might be three hoursโ€”COOL, go at it! Other days, it might be 30 minutes. Also cool! Even 30 minutes will save you so much time during the week (I can make hard boiled eggs, overnight oats, and a few mason jar salads in 30 minutes!).

Whatever answer you get from yourself, set your timer and work that long. When the timer goes off, finish the task at hand, clean up, and move on with your day. Trust me, this has been the key to keeping meal prep sustainable in my life for the past 5+ yearsโ€”giving myself the flexibility to do as much or as little as I want on a prep day.

iPhone in a green case showing a timer reading 49:38

If meal prep constantly feels like a burden, you can also consider splitting up your preps into multiple mini sessions throughout the week. Maybe you make a salad for lunch and just slice some extra veggies and put them into jars for mason jar salads. Maybe you put sweet potato chunks in the oven to roast while youโ€™re cooking dinner one night. Meal prep can be done in one big session, but it can also be done in spurts throughout the week. Again, experiment and figure out what works for your family and your schedule (and remember that this might shift from week to week!).

Streamline Your Meal Prepping

Once youโ€™ve got your timer going, make the most of your time by streamlining your prepping! To make the most out of my time, I try to start with the things that have an element of inactive work, like making bread or cooking hard boiled eggs. I can move on to other tasks while the water is coming to a boil and the dough is rising.

Easy-to-Peel Hard Boiled Eggs - Perfect Egg

I also try to chop all my veggies at onceโ€”this saves a ton of time! If I need one onion for each of two recipes, Iโ€™ll just chop two onions from the get-go. I also try to combine tasks so I donโ€™t have to wash or get out new kitchen utensilsโ€”I can use the same cutting board and knife to cut lettuce for mason jar salads as I can for cutting veggies for snacking.

Store Your Preps and USE THEM

I like to store my preps pretty exclusively in glass containers. Make sure to label them with both the contents (this is especially important if other people are going to eat your preps) and a โ€œbest byโ€ date on them. I just do this with either masking tape and a Sharpie, or write directly on glass with a Sharpie. It wipes right off with a cotton ball dipped in a little rubbing alcohol!

Woman in a teal shirt using a Sharpie to label a glass jar filled with salad in a jar.

And then USE THOSE PREPS! A lot of people seem to have this mindset to โ€œstockpileโ€ food preps for a busy day, but then end up realizing their food has gone bad in the fridge 7-10 days later. You made that food to eat, so eat it! Even if your day isnโ€™t particularly busy, go for it. You can always prep more food, but you can never get back food thatโ€™s gone bad. Eat your preps, friends!

Two divided glass containers filled with a meal prep lunch - chicken, berries, and vegetables.

Still Need Help? Try Specialized Meal Prep Menus!

If youโ€™re still feeling overwhelmed, I totally hear you! A good place to start might be to use some meal prep menus for a few weeks. These are great because you get a full menu for the week already planned out for you, plus a meal prep schedule/checklist that you can follow on meal prep day, plus a premade printable grocery list. You just have to do the actual cookingโ€”all the planning work is done for you!

Pages from the Resprout wellness program

All the weekly menus in Resprout are meal prep focused, which means youโ€™ll have lifetime access to six weeks worth of fully planned prep sheets, grocery lists, menus, and recipes. You could easily just cycle through the six menus and never have to think about what youโ€™re going to eat ever again! These menus and recipes are included with the full Resprout programโ€”which also has six weeks of body positive yoga, meditation, and journaling work.

Sign up here to be notified when Resprout opens again for registration.

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176 Comments

  1. Silly question but what do you eat on the black bean burgers? If anything? no bun I am assuming? Thanks!

    1. Not a silly question! I eat them on a whole wheat bun, usually with avocado, sprouts, and tomatoes. Sometimes I crumble them onto salads. ๐Ÿ™‚

  2. Great information! I agree that weekend prep is a huge factor in my family eatting heathy, staying on budget, and saving time. I develop our weekly menu and grocery shop on Saturdays and then complete the food prep on Sundays. I prepare three week evening meals and snacks. Each night I blend the smoothies for breakfast while cleaning up the evening meal food. Since I work from home, I just throw together the left over ingredients from the prepped meals and create something for my lunches.

  3. Hi! I’m just beginning to food prep for my partner and I but am confused about the correct way to start, we just moved into a new house and got a costco membership! We have gone over your recipes and LOVE all of them. But here’s the real question: we need to make a beginning shopping list, what needs to be on that list? Can you make a “must-have” fridge and pantry list? so we can slowly build our stores! Thank you so much!

  4. Thank you very much for the post. This is he first time I saw your site and I’ll sure come back. I’m a beginner in meal planning so the posts like yours help me a lot. Thank you.

  5. Great Post! Everyone is genetically built a little different. I have found eating for my body type has really improved my macronutrient caloric intake. Also, I have found by using the handful method and by using pre-measured meal prep container like http://macrostacks.com versus measuring spoons and cups I am more consistent with proper nutrition for my body type.

    Thanks for the post!!

  6. Hello love this post just a quick question .. Do the overnight oats stay fresh all week ? … Ohh also do you have the recipe for the granola bars ? Ta

    1. From my experience, the oats themselves stay fresh but if you’re adding fruit, I would do it on the day of eating, otherwise it starts to taste funky after a couple of day.s

  7. Wow! Thank you for posting this. It encouraged me to blog about my meal prep. For breakfast (oatmeal jars, farina, veggie omelette); 3 roasted/grilled/broiled/baked fish or chicken; 3 starches (rice/quinoa/sweet potatoes); 3 veggies (baby spinach, tuscan kale, 3 other veggies); snack (green fruit smoothie, fruit, granola); extra protein (crockpot beans, lentils, whey protein). I usually keep my veggies and carbs on the simple side (chicken base, sea salt, peppercorn medley) just in case I want to use them for a salad toppers, in soups, or a side dish for any ethnic dish. I usually season my meats for a selected ethnic theme (cuban, italian, hispanic, caribbean, american, etc). I usually make at least one ethnic dish each week so I have something exciting to look forward to.

    I mix and match to minimize boredom.

    Most of the food I cook is portioned out in 1 cup servings, placed in plastic storage containers and frozen. This way, if I do not get a chance to eat something, I can eat it the next week.

  8. Everything looks delicious & I love how easy it is to eat healthy food all week.when you do this! I linked to this on my blog, too. Thanks for sharing your awesome meal prep!