Most people don’t notice how much stress they feel comes from their relationship with food. It’s hard to take that relationship too seriously at face value, skipping breakfast here, eating whatever at lunch and grabbing dinner again at night, but it creates a never ending cycle of minor everyday problems.
What should I eat.
When should I eat.
Do I have any of the stuff in my house?
Do I need to make something or should I just order because that is easier right now?
They don’t feel like a big deal at the moment but they drain the background energy you have for every other thing. This is the exact area meal prep can help with.
Meal prep does not mean making fancy dishes or forcing yourself to be on a specific diet. It simply means removing daily confusion about food. If you decide what to eat once or twice a week, instead of multiple times a day, then after the initial setup everything is taken care of.
This shift seems like it shouldn’t do much but it changes your whole week.
When you have your food figured out in advance, you know when things are coming. There is no more staring into the fridge and waiting to find food magically appear before your eyes. It is all there. It reduces your mental load more than you might expect and lets you focus on work, study, rest, everything else.
Another thing that gets better with meal prep is your time. If you cook everyday, that energy is used up throughout the week. The exact same tasks will be repeated over and over, washing, cutting, cooking, cleaning, all at points when you are tired. With meal prep, you only need to do that at one specific point in time. Then you get all those times for free.
This does not mean hours a day in the kitchen. If anything it is the opposite and most people find that they actually spend less total time cooking when they prepare meals in batches. What is different about meal prep is the system that gets put in place, instead of reacting to hunger, you think ahead.
People often think meal prep means being boring or stuck eating the same meal over and over, which is not how it needs to be. Some people will make full meals in meal containers. Others will pick out ingredients like rice, vegetables and meat and make those into different meals. This can be done without adding much difficulty.
The system needs to work for you, not you for the system.
And this is how it can continue to be helpful over a long period of time. Because it is not a fixed pattern that you are forced into, but simply the ability to give your self structure without a restriction on freedom.
Starting out is usually the hardest part, but not because it’s complicated. It’s because people tend to overthink it. People end up trying to make the perfect start, picking too many dishes or going for a dream version of what they want instead of just a realistic one. Meal prep needs to be simple when you start out. Just a few things, a few basic ingredients and some time you are realistically going to have for your food.
After a few times of repeating it, you will know what meals you like together, how much food you can make and how you need to organize everything. It starts to feel normal over time so you do not think about it too much and it becomes a part of your normal routine.
There is one more benefit of meal prep that you will likely not notice but is still significant. Because you are not constantly thinking about when and what to eat, you are less subject to decision fatigue. This does not sound like a lot but the daily food cycle is one of the few constant daily problems you will have to solve and you get rid of it by preparing meals in advance.
People usually will notice they have easier evenings as they don’t need to figure out dinner after spending all day working because there is already a meal prepared for you. This might not seem like a significant benefit until you actually experience it, and then it is hard to put into words just how calming it is. Meal prep is not just about the food, but making sure your daily routine is a less stressful one.
There is another benefit that you can get from doing this that is not always as popular: consistency. You might end up with an easier time sticking to a healthier diet or stopping random snacking or just getting back to your regular routine if your meal schedule is already taken care of. You do not have to make everything perfect though, that is not what meal prep is about. It is simply being more steady. It is better if your life is set up so everything is not always a struggle.
The more you use it, the more you will get used to and be able to rely on this meal prep system. It just becomes part of how you set up your life behind the scenes, like budgeting your day or making a schedule. Once your meal prep system is set up, it is like everything else around your week becomes much easier, less chaotic, less thinking, and you are in control of how your week is organized.