This is Why I Meal Prep Every Week
Spoiler: It has nothing to do with my body.
Most weekends, I spend a couple of hours making a big batch of two or three different meals. I portion them out into Ziploc containers and eat them throughout the week. Mostly, I work from home, but meal prep is just as important to me now as it was when I was in the office every day.
What started out six or seven years ago as a tool for weight loss is now a comfortable, reliable part of my weekly routine that has very little to do with controlling what I eat, and everything to do with saving time, money, stress, and waste. When I don’t make time to meal prep, I regret it!
I don’t generally mind eating the same meals throughout the week, so I’ll often make just two different types of food, and depending on the day I’ll eat one for lunch and one for dinner.
My friend Cassandra needs more variety in her life, so she uses a program called Workweek Lunch to prep two different kinds of breakfasts and 3-4 kinds of lunches/dinners most weeks. Even with all of that, her prep only takes her one evening!
Side note: While I don’t use it myself, Workweek Lunch is awesome. It’s run by a totally relatable, down-to-earth young boss lady. It’s anti-diet culture, so it’s just good, tasty meals you’ll love to eat. And it’s only $8/month for super customizable (or super cookie-cutter, whatever is best for you) grocery lists and instructions that take the emotional labor out of meal planning. I’m not affiliated at all with Workweek Lunch or its creator . . . I just think it’s a great resource—and it also has a colorful, fun Instagram account.
The bottom line is: meal-prepping can be whatever you need it to be, and it has so many benefits that have nothing to do with shrinking your body.
Meal prepping decreases stress.
Like every art, cooking is an activity that can relieve stress just by doing it.
Even if cooking sounds stressful to you now (because you don’t do it regularly, you don’t know how, or you just don’t like doing it), like most things, it gets easier as you go. I’ve known Cassandra for over ten years, and for the first decade we knew each other, she survived on take-out, pre-made convenience meals, and fast food. We used to play a game in which we’d name an intersection, and she’d list all of the fast-food restaurants she knew within a given radius.
It was impressive.
The idea of cooking meals from scratch stressed her out, so when she started using Workweek Lunch about a year and a half ago, she was a sparkly new beginner! After cooking for over a year, she feels comfortable “throwing things together” in a way that she never thought was possible. She feels confident and accomplished, and she enjoys the process of putting together familiar meals and learning new ones. And the things she makes are good! I look forward to meals she cooks for me (because now — get this — she also cooks for fun).
Not only can the act of cooking itself alleviate stress, but at the end of that process, you have the final product which allows you complete freedom from decision-making for the rest of the week. No figuring out on the fly if you should really spend $9 on a deli sandwich. No waffling between three possible dinners that all sound equally “meh.” Your emotional labor is complete. You reach into the refrigerator and grab what you’ve prepared. And if you are really hankering for that $9 deli sandwich, you can toss your pre-made meal in the freezer for another time!
Complete freedom.
Low stress.
Meal prepping saves time.
If spending an hour at the grocery store and a few hours in the kitchen seems like too much, I get it. But think about all of the time that adds up here and there: thinking about what to eat, deciding how to purchase it, shopping for it (or ordering it online or in-person), waiting to be served at a restaurant…
Let’s look, for example, at one Monday.
Mondays are hard. The weekend was busy, you didn’t get to rest as much as you wanted to, so you wake up feeling over-tired and feeling behind. You open and close the fridge a few times as you’re getting ready to go and don’t see anything you can throw together quickly. So you skip making breakfast and arrive at work with a disgustingly accurate “case of the Mondays” (thanks, Karen; yes, the weekends are always too short, you’re right; no I won’t work too hard today — ha, ha, ha, grumble, grumble, grumble).
By the time you get to your desk, you’re hungry. So you check your morning email but you’re distracted by food options. Of course, there’s the coffee machine in the break room. You could just have a cup of coffee and see how that goes. Or you could walk across the street to the Walgreens and pick something up. A Clif bar or a yogurt or something. Or the McDonald’s the next block over. Ooh. At McDonald’s, you could get coffee (the office stuff is meh anyway) a warm sandwich, and a delicious hashbrown patty, too. Yep.
You turn your computer to sleep mode, grab your coat, and make the five-minute walk to McDonald’s.
It’s fast food, right? So you should be back at the office in, like, 12 minutes. Five minutes there, two minutes to order and grab the food, and then five minutes back.
It goes pretty much according to plan, except that they just ran out of hashbrowns so you have to wait for the next batch. Just a few extra minutes. Negligible. You make it back to the office 17 minutes after you left.
Okay, 17 minutes doesn’t seem that bad. (I mean, your boss might not agree, but...)
Remember, though, that you’ve also dedicated the first fifteen minutes of your workday to distractedly checking email while your brain was actually focused on breakfast decisions. At this point in the day, you’ve already given half an hour to just one meal — arguably, the simplest meal of the day.
A couple of hours later, you mindlessly start thinking about where to go for lunch. You decide on a mom-and-pop restaurant across the street from the office. It’s kind of your go-to. Reasonable prices, personal service.
It’s busy today, and service is a little slower than usual. You arrive at 11:30, place your order by 11:40, and the food comes out at 11:55. You ask for the check and pay it right away, so when you’re finished eating at 12:15 you can head back to the office. You were hoping to call your sister on your lunch break today, but that’ll have to wait, because you’ve just spent 45 minutes on food and have to get ready to get back to work.
And then — dinner. The biggest question. Do you make something at home? What do you have? Would you need to stop at the grocery store? Should you just order take-out? What are you in the mood for? You could go to a restaurant, too.
Depending on the route you take, you could be spending 30–90 minutes on this decision and activity, too.
So that’s basically 2–3 hours you’d spend on food in just one day.
You could cook meals for a whole week in that time.
Meal prepping saves money.
Full disclosure: I very, very, very rarely eat the way that the random example person I just wrote about did on their Monday. If I eat out twice in a day, it’s because I’m traveling, which I used to do for work fairly regularly. With my lifestyle slash paycheck-style, it would not be possible for me to spend that much money on food on a regular basis.
My grocery budget is $200 per month. I live in Chicago, and I cook just for me (with the occasional meal shared with a friend or a group). I also set aside $50 each month on “fun” eating, which I often only use part of. This is my “eating out” budget as well as my “this doesn’t really count as groceries but I want to eat it anyway” budget (usually random candy purchases, if I’m being totally honest).
The weeks that I don’t plan my meals, I end up buying convenience food. For me, convenience food usually means the salad bar or hot food bar at the grocery store, deli salads, and frozen meals. When I eat two meals a day from the salad bar, that’s $20-$25. That’s half of my weekly grocery budget. PANIC NOW.
So, you know, depending on your income and your preferred lifestyle, saving money might not be a big motivator for you. It is for me, though, so I cook at home and make sure I have easy-to-grab, prepped meals on hand.
Meal prepping decreases waste.
On average, Americans waste one pound of food per person per day. What.
And I know, I know—that’s an average. You might not toss seven pounds of food when you clean out your refrigerator at the end of the week (and someone else might throw away 30 pounds — eek)!
When you buy groceries without a practicable plan, though, you’re more likely to toss wilty produce and spoiled meat at the end of the week.
And the issue goes deeper than simply the apple that gets tossed into the garbage. The water and energy that went into growing that apple (the machinery, the fertilizer, the irrigation, the labor) all gets wasted, too.
Food waste ends up wasting nearly a quarter of our water supply in the form of uneaten food or over $172 billion in wasted water. Each year, as a country we spend over $220 billion growing, transporting, and processing almost 70 million tons of food that ends up going to waste. If the land that we cultivate growing food that goes to waste in the US were all in one place, it would cover more than 3/4 of California! Growing food that goes to waste ends up using up 21% of our freshwater, 19% of our fertilizer, 18% of our cropland, and 21% of our landfill volume.(Source)
When you create a meal plan week-by-week, you are more likely to buy the right amounts of food, actually cook it, and actually eat it. It’s the same benefits as creating an action plan to reach a specific goal.
And those are just the benefits of not wasting the food itself.
But if your style is currently more like Cassandra circa 2011, think about all of the packaging that’s being wasted, too: fast food and take-out meals are packaged in paper wrappers or cardboard or styrofoam boxes, and then placed in bags (in the case of a lot of take-out, it seems like the food is placed in a paper bag and then into a secondary plastic one).
When you cook at home, you have more control over the packaging waste you create. By buying fresh produce, you can often avoid packaging altogether, and shelf-stable supplies like flour, grains, pasta, and nuts can be purchased in large bulk containers, reducing the amount of packaging required per ounce of food over time. You can bring reusable cloth bags to limit the amount of plastic you use.
Cooking at home also allows you to buy locally and buy what’s in season. This cuts down on environmental costs of production and transportation (like additional water necessary for irrigation out-of-season, and fuel to ship the produce from its far-off point of origin). As a bonus, in-season produce is usually cheaper (and tastes more flavorful) than anything that has to be specially transported or produced out of its natural season!
So much of the media’s focus on meal-prepping tends to highlight meal prep as a tool to control portions and nutrition.
The truth, though, is that meal prepping has benefits that reach far beyond changing what your body looks like. Meal-prepping can improve your mental health, increase your financial health, affect your day-to-day freedom, and impact the environment.
If you’re thinking about meal prep, check out this get-started guide and this list of my go-to easy and delicious meal-prep recipes.
