Weekly meal prep: how to prepare food for the whole week in 2 hours

What meal prep is (and what it is not)

Meal prep (short for meal preparation) means cooking several days of meals in one go, usually on Sunday, and leaving them portioned in containers. It is not a diet: it is a way of organising your kitchen so that when you get home tired on a Tuesday afternoon, the easiest option is the one you already chose calmly. Bodybuilders have done it for decades; the version in this guide is for anyone who wants to eat reasonably well without cooking every day: 9 containers, about 2 hours of cooking and a menu with the calories worked out container by container.

Step-by-step plan: what to cook on Sunday in 2 hours

This is the order that uses the oven and the hob at the same time. The times are a guide, because they depend on your oven and on the size of the pieces; the only number that is not a guide is the chicken temperature: 74 °C (165 °F) in the centre (USDA).

• Minute 0: oven to 200 °C (400 °F). Dice the sweet potato, cut the pepper and courgette into strips and the broccoli into florets.
• Minute 10: tray 1 with sweet potato, pepper and courgette and a little oil (35-40 minutes). Tray 2 with the chicken breasts (about 25 minutes, until 74 °C in the centre).
• Minute 15: on the hob, the lentils with carrot and onion (30-40 minutes), the rice (about 20) and the quinoa (about 15).
• Minute 35: hard-boiled eggs (10-12 minutes, then into cold water). When the chicken comes out, the salmon goes in (12-15 minutes). Steam the broccoli for 5-6 minutes.
• Minute 60: split the rice between two shallow containers; the Friday one goes into the freezer within the first hour. Spread the rest out to cool, without stacking containers.
• Minute 75-110: weigh and build the 9 containers with the table below, label each one with its day and store them: 6 in the fridge and 3 in the freezer.

The shopping list for 9 containers

Quantities for one person: 5 lunches and 4 dinners. The raw amounts are worked out from the cooked ones using USDA FoodData Central values, so treat them as approximate: what matters is the cooked weight of each container.

• Chicken breast: about 500 g raw, which gives about 360 g roasted (3 portions of 120 g)
• Salmon: 2 fillets, for 2 portions of 120 g once cooked
• Dry lentils: about 170-180 g, which gives about 500 g cooked (2 portions of 250 g)
• Eggs: 6
• Rice: about 105 g raw (300 g cooked). Quinoa: about 100 g raw (300 g cooked)
• Sweet potato: enough for 600 g once roasted and peeled
• Broccoli: enough for 600 g cooked. Red pepper: 300 g. Courgette: 300 g. Carrot and onion: 100 g of each
• Olive oil: about 45 g in total, roughly 3 tablespoons

The 5-day menu, with calories that add up

Lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday. With just the two containers, each day adds up to 897-968 kcal; the rest (breakfast and snacks) depends on your goal. If you are aiming for 1,800 kcal, for example, you have about 830-900 kcal left to spread out. Work out your own number with the calorie calculator.

What goes in each container: grams and kcal

USDA FoodData Central values per 100 g: roasted chicken breast 165 kcal, cooked salmon 206, cooked white rice 130, cooked quinoa 120, boiled lentils 116, hard-boiled egg 155, baked sweet potato 90, boiled broccoli 35 and olive oil 884. If you weigh it cooked, the cooked to raw weight calculator tells you what it weighed raw. And to know what each container holds, the recipe calorie calculator adds up the raw ingredients and splits them by servings. Roasted vegetables are counted by raw weight (red pepper 26, courgette 17). With these you can check every sum:

• Chicken, rice and broccoli (489 kcal, 45 g protein): 120 g roasted chicken (198) + 150 g rice (195) + 150 g broccoli (52) + 5 g oil (44)
• Salmon, sweet potato and broccoli (479 kcal, 34 g protein): 120 g salmon (247) + 200 g sweet potato (180) + 150 g broccoli (52)
• Lentils with vegetables (418 kcal, 24 g protein): 250 g cooked lentils (290) + 50 g carrot (20) + 50 g onion (20) + 10 g oil (88)
• Eggs, quinoa and roasted vegetables (499 kcal, 28 g protein): 3 hard-boiled eggs, about 150 g (232) + 150 g quinoa (180) + 100 g pepper and 100 g courgette (43) + 5 g oil (44)
• Chicken, sweet potato and roasted vegetables (465 kcal, 43 g protein): 120 g roasted chicken (198) + 200 g sweet potato (180) + 200 g pepper and courgette (43) + 5 g oil (44)

How long each food lasts in the fridge and the freezer

Storage times for food that is already cooked, with the fridge at 4 °C (40 °F) or below. Freezer times (−18 °C / 0 °F) are for quality, not safety: at that temperature food stays safe indefinitely, but it loses texture and flavour (FoodSafety.gov). That is why the plan only keeps in the fridge what gets eaten from Monday to Wednesday.

Cooling, freezing and reheating without surprises

Meal prep food spoils less because of the days in the fridge than because of what happens before: the hours it sits lukewarm on the counter. These are the rules from food safety agencies, and they are what make the plan work:

• No more than 2 hours at room temperature after cooking, according to the USDA and AESAN (1 hour above 32 °C / 90 °F, according to the USDA).
• Hot food can go straight into the fridge (USDA). What helps is splitting it into shallow containers (USDA) and not stacking them, so air can circulate and it cools evenly (AESAN).
• Rice is the special case: Bacillus cereus spores survive cooking and, if the rice cools slowly, they can produce a toxin that reheating does not destroy (AESAN). Cool it in under an hour and reheat it only once (FSA).
• Thaw in the fridge the night before, not on the counter. Once thawed in the fridge, you have 3-4 days (USDA).
• Reheat until it is steaming in the centre: AESAN asks for at least 74 °C (165 °F) for 15 seconds. Stir halfway, because microwaves leave cold spots.

Benefits of meal prep: what the studies say (and what they do not)

There are no large trials on meal prep as such, but there are studies on its two ingredients: planning meals and eating food cooked at home. They are all observational, so they show associations, not cause and effect:

• Planning is linked to a better and more varied diet. In 40,554 French adults from the NutriNet-Santé study, people who planned their meals were more likely to follow nutrition guidelines (OR 1.13) and to eat a more varied diet (OR 1.25), and less likely to have obesity: OR 0.79 in women and 0.81 in men (Ducrot, 2017).
• Eating home-cooked food is linked to more fruit and vegetables. In 11,396 British adults, those who ate home-cooked meals more than 5 times a week ate 62 g more fruit and 98 g more vegetables a day than those who did so fewer than 3 times, and were 28% less likely to have an overweight BMI (Mills, 2017).
• Home cooking counts. In 4,942 US adults, preparing food at home was among the household features most strongly linked to meeting the fruit and vegetable recommendation (Kegler, 2021).
• Portion control: if you weigh after cooking, you know what is in each container. It is the difference between guessing by eye and actually counting.
• Time: this is arithmetic, not a study. If cooking each meal takes you 30 minutes, 9 meals are 4.5 hours; the Sunday session is about 2, plus a few minutes of reheating each day.

The basic equipment

• 9-10 glass containers of 600-800 ml with airtight lids, microwave and freezer safe
• Two large oven trays
• One pot for the legumes and two saucepans for the rice and quinoa
• A marker or labels to write the day on each container
• Kitchen scale: it is what makes the calories in the table real (or scan the container with Renzy)

How not to get bored of the same containers

Cook the bases plain and change the flavour when you serve: lemon and oregano on Monday, soy and ginger on Tuesday, paprika and cumin on Wednesday, yoghurt with garlic and mint on Thursday. Count the sauces, because a tablespoon of mayonnaise or pesto can add more kcal than all the vegetables in the container. And every 2-3 weeks swap one protein (turkey for chicken, chickpeas for lentils) so you do not tire of the menu.

With Renzy you can take a photo of each container on Sunday and see an estimate of the calories and macros for the whole week before it starts. If you also weigh after cooking, compare it with the table above and you will know whether your meal prep covers your goals.