How to Meal Prep (Guide for Beginners)

If you’re new to meal prepping, this beginner’s guide is a great place to start. Learn everything you need to know how to meal prep, so you can make weekly meals a breeze! Meal prep is a great way to make cooking and eating a lot easier when life gets busy. I’m sharing tons of tips, ideas, and recipes to help you start meal prepping for the week and make it part of your new routine.

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How to Meal Prep for the Week

Meal prep is the thing to do these days. Whether you’re trying to manage a busy schedule, follow a special diet, or just make meal time a lot easier, learning how to meal prep is a great option.

If you’re a meal prepping beginner, it might seem overwhelming at first. But it doesn’t have to take up a lot of time, and you don’t have to have every single meal 100% prepped and perfectly contained at the start of the week.

You can do this process in a way that works for you, your life, and your family. It’s meant to make cooking and eating easier, not more intimidating.

Beginner’s Guide: How to Meal Prep

I’m sharing tons of meal prep guidance, tips, and recipes with you to help you get started! Here’s what you’ll learn in this easy beginner’s guide:

• Why you should start meal prepping.
• How to meal prep for the week.
• Meal prep tips for beginners.
• The best meal prep containers to use.
• Easy meal prep ideas to try.
• How to meal prep, a step by step plan.

What is Meal Prep?

Simply put, meal prepping just means preparing and cooking meals ahead of time, so that you have food ready to eat later. You can prepare full meals and store them in the fridge or freezer to reheat. Or you can cook and prep ingredients, to cut down on prep time. It can be as simple or as involved as you prefer, do whatever works for you!

If you’re trying to figure out how to meal prep for the week and start making it part of your regular routine, these tips and ideas will help you get going.

Benefits of Meal Prepping

There are so many reasons to make meal prepping a part of your weekly routine. Here are some of the most common reasons people start doing it:

1. Time-saving: Do the bulk of your cooking in one day, and have meals prepared for the whole week! If you’re always busy and on the go, this will relieve a lot of stress, so you can have good food without using up precious time.
2. Budget-friendly: Having any kind of meal plan can help you save money at the store, because you know exactly what you need. Having food prepared at home also means you are less likely to find yourself running out to grab food for convenience or ordering delivery, which gets expensive.
3. Healthy: If you’re worried about portion control for weight loss, cooking for special diets, or other health and nutrition concerns, prepping meals is a great way to go. Your meals are already portioned out, so you know exactly how much to eat, and you can be more intentional about what you eat.

Meal prepping is really great if you’re following a special diet, whether you’re keto, gluten-free, vegetarian/vegan, low-carb, paleo, etc. It’s a lot easier to stick to these diets if your meals are all planned and prepped!

How do I start meal prepping?

If you’re totally new to weekly meal prepping, the best way to get started is to make a plan.

• Buy some meal prep containers to store your food.
• Gather the meal prep recipes that you want to make.
• Schedule a few hours in your week (Meal Prep Sunday is a good time to do it) to do the cooking.
• Make a grocery list based on the recipes you chose, and go buy the ingredients at the store. (Check out our FREE Printable Grocery List!)
• Make a general plan of what you need to do based on the recipes and ingredients you are preparing. For example, wash produce, chop veggies in bulk, and plan out cooking times for various dishes (start with the longest cook time for efficiency).

My biggest tip for beginners is to start small–you don’t want to overwhelm yourself the first time you try it out. Again, meal prepping is all about making your life easier!

Dedicate an hour to prepare a simple meal that you can portion out for dinners every night of the week. Or just portion out ingredients to make salads for lunch every day, so you can just grab them and go in the morning. Eventually you’ll get used to prepping food and recipes in bulk, and the whole process will become much simpler.

How far ahead of time can I meal prep?

The easiest and most common method is to meal prep for a week at a time. Fresh foods, veggies, and prepared foods will typically keep in the fridge for 3-5 days, so any further in advance might leave you with wasted food.

However, if you want to prep things that can be frozen ahead of time, consider making large batches of those recipes a month in advance, then thaw them out for a week at a time. This is especially useful for soups, casseroles, and large-batch family meals.

Is meal prepping healthy?

This depends on your goals. Meal prep is very popular with people on special diets, whether it’s gluten-free, keto, low-carb, vegetarian/vegan, clean eating, etc. And it’s definitely a great way to portion out foods, plan meals, and make sure you stick to any nutrition or weight loss goals.

However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be healthy foods. Planning and preparing home cooked meals ahead of time makes it a lot easier to eat well and stick to healthier eating, but if you’re just worried about saving time, you can make any kind of recipes you like.

How long does meal prep take?

It depends on what you’re making, and how much you’re making. But you should set aside a few hours at the start of each week to get all of your food prepared.

2-3 hours is a good time frame for a week of meal prepping, but you can cut down your time once you get the hang of it!

If you’re just preparing a single meal, it can go much faster. For example, prepping a simple work lunch for 3-5 days of the week, you can make a batch of rice, veggies, and chicken to portion out, and it can be as quick as 1 hour. Especially if you’re using an Instant Pot or Air Fryer–my star appliances for meal prep days!

Do I have to prepare every meal in advance?

No! You can, if that will make your life easier. But you might only have one meal a day that causes you stress. 

• You can meal prep for breakfasts, so you don’t have to wake up earlier to get a good meal first thing in the morning.
• You can prep meals for lunch to take to work, so you don’t have to buy lunches every day.
• If your family’s schedule makes evenings extra busy, meal prep dinner so everyone has something to eat, even when you don’t have time to cook.

Do whatever works best for you! You can also prep ingredients instead of entire meals, to help get a head start on cooking each day.

What are the best meal prep containers?

If you’re going to start meal prepping, you’re going to need plenty of reusable containers to store the food in. You can use any type of sealed, reusable containers you prefer. Just start with what you already have at home!

But if meal prepping becomes a regular thing in your life, it’s worthwhile to stock up on nice containers.

• I recommend glass containers instead of buying more plastic. They’re more durable in the microwave and dishwasher, better for storing and reheating food, and better for the planet.
• Buy containers with good, fully sealable lids. Those flimsy plastic ones end up misshapen after a few rounds through the dishwasher, and the lids don’t seem to fit perfectly anymore.
• If you’re portioning out meals for each day of the week, it’s helpful to have a full set of the same exact container and size. So grab 5 of the same container to make it easy to portion out your meals.
• Get a set of meal prep containers with various sizes if you plan to just prep ingredients and combine things later in the week. I also like having small round ones for sauces, so I can keep them separate from the food.
• If you want to prepare lunches but still keep foods separated, get containers with compartments.

You can find food storage containers almost anywhere, so just keep an eye out for the ones that work best for you. I recommend starting with a set of glass containers for weekly meal prep, but you don’t need a specific type to make this work!

What recipes are good for meal prepping?

The best recipes for meal prep are the ones that are easy to store and reheat. So if you have a favorite casserole, soup, rice bowl, or another dish where you typically save leftovers (or a dish that you often make ahead of time), that’s a good place to start!

Also consider recipes that don’t require intensive cooking, or things that can be made in a slow cooker, Instant Pot, or Air Fryer. This will make the whole process much simpler!

Another good meal prepping strategy is to just cook up a big batch of grains (rice, quinoa, etc.), a big batch of veggies, and a big batch of protein (chicken, beans, etc.), and then just portion everything out into separate containers.

Beginner Meal Prep Recipes

If you’re just learning how to meal prep, start with simple recipes! These ideas are all easy to make, delicious, and good for weekly meals.

I like to make Crockpot chicken breast, shredded chicken, or a batch of ground beef to add to recipes for easy protein. Cooking rice in the Instant Pot or this cilantro lime rice is a good base. Then add simple veggies, like roasted vegetables or air fryer broccoli.

Sheet pan meals are an easy way to make everything at once, then just portion it out. Try this sheet pan salmon recipe or this honey garlic chicken and veggies.

One bowl recipes–like egg roll in a bowl (keto), buddha bowls, and burrito bowls–are perfectly designed for meal prepping, and they’re usually pretty nutritious too.

And if you want to get a head start on your mornings, make overnight oats, protein balls, or egg bites (these are quick to make and can be stored in the freezer long-term).

How to Meal Prep Step by Step

Let’s combine everything we just learned about meal prepping in this beginner’s guide, and lay it out in a straightforward plan so you can get started with your weekly meal prep!

• Plan: Collect the recipes you want to make for the week, make a grocery list and do your shopping, then schedule 2-3 hours to do your cooking. It helps to outline a meal plan for the week, so you know which meals to make.
• Cook: Organize and prep your ingredients for each recipe, get out your kitchen tools (using your slow cooker, Instant Pot, and Air Fryer frees up stove/oven space), and start cooking. Making a few things at a time becomes easier to balance once you start doing this more often.
• Store: Let your food cool, separate it into your favorite meal prep containers, and dedicate some space in your fridge for your meals (you can also freeze some of your meals if you want to store them longer). Label your meals if needed.
• Reheat and Eat: When it’s time to eat, just grab a meal container, reheat (if needed), and enjoy!

Now that you know how to meal prep, you’ll save so much time! I hope these beginner meal prep ideas, tips, and recipes have been helpful to you. Remember, it’s all about making meal time throughout the week easier and more convenient for you, not more complicated. So create a food prep routine that works for you and your needs.