How I meal prepped for a year to completely transform my body.

All with a mini fridge, an Easy-Bake Oven, and only a few square feet of counter space.

Last week I wrote an article about how I completely transformed my body in one year. The piece had three parts: what I did in the kitchen, what I did in the gym, and what I did in the mind. The whole point of the article was to lay out the simple principles and ideas in each of these areas that are necessary to see change and improvement. The whole process is a lot easier than a lot of people make it out to be. Stick to the basic principles and you can’t help but see dramatic improvement.

The basic principles in the kitchen were as follows.

Eat real food and get real results. The definition of “real” here is whether you can explain how it used to be alive. This means sticking mostly to lots of veggies, fruit, nuts, whole grains, and some eggs and meat. It’s easy to explain how all those things used to be alive. For beverages, water, black coffee, unsweetened tea, and maybe milk. Things that you may be tempted to think are easy to explain how they used to be alive but actually require quite a bit of explaining: sugar, white flour, and alcohol. So minimize those.

Self-control versus self-regulation. Self-control is our ability to control ourselves in the face of urges and temptations. We suck at it. Self-regulation is our ability to plan ahead of time to reduce the frequency and intensity of those urges and temptations. We’re much better at it. My way of doing this was meal prepping. By having the food ahead of time I’d be much more likely to eat the prepped meal as opposed to junk. And when I was tempted by junk, I was much more likely to be full already — thereby decreasing the intensity of the urges.

Putting those two principles together, the action item from that article was to meal prep real food. Easy — right? Understandably, I got some requests for some more details about how I go about meal prepping. That’s what I’m going to get into here.

First, what I don’t do

I don’t use a kitchen scale. And I don’t count macros or calories or anything like that — at all. I bought the kitchen scale and tried tracking for a hot minute, but immediately knew that it wasn’t going to work for me. It made everything feel like a science experiment for me instead of cooking and eating, which is how it should feel.

The way I look at it, if you want to be a bodybuilder or something like that, then you probably need to buy the scale and track the macros. But if that isn’t your goal, then it certainly isn’t necessary. You can make it a lot simpler and still get phenomenal results. You may not be a body builder, but you’ll be healthier and looking better and feeling better.

What I do do

One day a week I meal prep six lunches and six dinners and put them in meal prep divider trays (you can easily find them on Amazon or at Target) to refrigerate for the week. I prefer these trays because they allow me to do an easy visual portion control. And I prefer the divided ones because they allow me to easily include the components I try to get into each meal (more on that below). I only do six lunches and six dinners for the week because I’ll inevitably eat out or at a friend’s house once or twice during the week.

A lot of people express surprise that the prepped meals last all week. They do. I’ve never had an issue with food poisoning or spoilage or anything like that and I’ve never had an issue with flavor (in fact, many things end up tasting better over the course of the week).

A lot of people also express surprise that I don’t get sick of eating the same thing all week long. I have a lot of responses to that. For example, did you know that a lot of people, including famous and successful people eat the exact same lunch every day for years? It even makes sense from a decision fatigue standpoint. It’s one less thing to worry about and tax your mental bandwidth. Also, lots of people around the world eat very similar things every day. That’s the whole idea of cuisine. And at the end of the day, it really isn’t that bad once you give it a try. I haven’t ever gotten tired of a meal over the course of a week.

If you still think you’ll get tired of the meals you prep, here are some adjustments you could make. First, use it as an opportunity to prep something incredibly delicious! Second, make two different lunches and two different dinners for throughout the week and alternate them. Or find a friend to meal prep with and you can swap half of your meals to add some more variety. Third, if you can’t handle six meals, do three or four. You’ll still get incredible benefits.

In addition to the six lunches and six dinners, I also have preplanned snacks and a couple breakfasts that I can quickly and easily make each morning.

How I design meals

Remember those meal prep trays I mentioned? I get the ones with three sections. When I’m planning and prepping my lunches and dinners I use those as a guide. The big section gets the main dish, which is usually, but not always, meat based. Then one small section is dedicated to veggies and the other is dedicated to whole grains.

This leads to a pretty quick and fast meal prepping day. For lunch, a big pot or roasting pan for the main dish, a pot for the whole grains, and a roasting pan for the veggies. Repeat for the dinner.

What exactly do I eat?

Breakfast. I usually go one of two routes: oatmeal or eggs. If it’s oatmeal, I add banana and peanut butter and milk (blend the three together to make them delicious and creamy and rich!). Then I may throw in some almonds or walnuts or chia seeds for some crunch. Maybe some blueberries or raspberries. If I’m doing eggs, I cook bacon first, then cook up some onions and potatoes and bell peppers in a little bit of the bacon grease. Add in the eggs. Top with avocado and sriracha.

Lunch and dinner. As I mentioned above, I think about lunch and dinner in three parts: main dish, whole grain, and veggies. My whole grains are almost always quinoa and brown rice. For veggies, roast just about anything and it’s going to be delicious. Broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, butternut squash, carrots, squash, bell pepper, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, you name it. Roast it and it’ll be delicious. How none of our moms knew this in the 90s is beyond me.

As for the main dish, I’ve made a lot of different lunches and dinners over the course of the last year. Too many to list out. But here are some of my go-tos and ones that stand out for being particularly delicious. Stew, chili, curry, brined chicken breasts, oven roasted tri-tip, Italian sheet trays (look it up — so delicious!), pork chops, brown butter sage chicken, stuffed bell peppers, turkey balls, beef with broccoli. Google is your friend here. Just search for meal prepping ideas and recipes and you’ll find plenty of delicious options.

Snacks. For snacks, I’ve always got fruit on hand. I also always make a decent size pot of lentils to have throughout the week (split red lentils are my favorite!). Stovetop popcorn is another go to. And dark chocolate. Always dark chocolate (like really, really dark). And sometimes some roasted yams or sweet potatoes for a late night snack.

Wait a minute. Bacon?!

That’s right bacon. And even some of the bacon grease. You may be surprised that you can get results with some of the items I listed. But here’s what they all had in common: it’s easy to explain how all of them used to be alive. Our bodies are pretty good at running off of all of these things. They’re not so great at running off of things that came out of plastic wrappers, made in a lab, with a list of ingredients that it would take a degree in biochemistry to understand.

You may also have other responses based on eating keto, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, or some other approach to eating. I don’t have a problem with any of these approaches, per se. In my view, you can do any of these approaches well, and you can do any of these approaches poorly. Each of these approaches have highly processed foods available where you won’t be able to explain how it used to be alive. But they also have tons of foods that very clearly used to be alive. Stick to those ones and you’re going to do just fine.

The benefits of cooking and eating this way

Satiety. Real food has a higher satiety index than processed food. That is, it fills you up more and for a longer period of time. We’ve all had the experience of stuffing our face with junk food and never getting full — of if we do get full, of being hungry again in 30 minutes. That doesn’t happen with real food.

Self regulation. With all those prepped meals in the fridge, self-regulation is going to be a cinch. You know that if you don’t eat something before going out with friends or going to that party that you’ll struggle with self-control. So eat one of those delicious meals you prepped and the satiety that it produces will reduce the need for self-control at all! That’s self-regulation at work.

Save time and money. It goes without saying how much time and money this can save. We all know that eating out is expensive. Now that you’re meal prepping, you’ve self-regulated yourself to eat out less. And doing almost all of your cooking in big batches on one day saves countless hours throughout the week.

Easy to adjust. Over the course of the last year there have been periods when I was trying to gain weight, and periods when I was trying to lose weight. Doing either of these was simple. I didn’t have to switch from this diet to that diet or avoid certain foods or anything like that. All I had to do was make more or less of the same things. And that’s super easy to do with the meal prepping trays.

A word of encouragement

When I decided to start meal prepping, I didn’t know if I’d physically be able to pull it off because of the constraints of my kitchen. I live in a tiny studio with a ridiculously tiny kitchen. The oven is the size of an Easy-Bake Oven, the counter space can hold three dinner plates if the third dinner plate is hanging precariously off the edge, and I have a mini-fridge. Yes, like the one you had in your college dorm room. As a result of all of this, my meal prepping looks like a three ring circus. I squat on the floor to ladle things out. Dirty dishes stack up in the closet. And my mini fridge looks like a professional Tetris player organized it for me.

Every single week I feel like meal prepping is a huge hassle when I’m in the middle of it and think about giving it up. But later in the week, I remember why I do it every single week. I feel great. It’s delicious. It saves so much time and mental energy. And it’s been the foundation of completely transforming my body over the course of the last year.