How to meal prep for the week: a beginner's system

The system in five steps

Meal prep fails for a boring reason: people try to cook seven days of dinners on the first Sunday, finish exhausted and quit. The system below is built to be small enough to repeat. The minutes are a budget we set for a first session, not a stopwatch measurement, so treat them as a ceiling to stay under.

Starting small is the idea behind this system. One popular guide, from Fit Men Cook, says that if you spend more than two to three hours in the kitchen it is time to simplify your menu. Our own advice is stricter: for your first week, make only five bowls of the first recipe below, for five lunches, and add the second recipe when that feels easy.

What one top-ranking guide leaves out

We read a top-ranking beginner guide for this question on 2026-10-27. It explains what meal prep is, lists foods, tools and a four-step process, and gives five recipes. But in the recipe descriptions on that page, only one gives nutrition numbers, and it tells you to write a shopping list but does not give one for its recipes. It gives a fridge limit of four days as a rule of thumb without naming a source (see Fit Men Cook).

That is the gap this page fills. You get the numbers for every bowl, one merged list with weights, a cooking order, and a storage plan that follows the stricter of two official sources. None of this is advice to eat a certain amount: the portions are examples, and what suits you depends on your size, your activity and your goals. This page is general information, not medical advice. If you have a medical condition, are pregnant or have a history of disordered eating, ask a doctor or a registered dietitian before you change how you eat.

The four bowls we calculated

Every bowl has the same frame: 120 g of broccoli, 9 g of olive oil, and a sauce of 50 g of plain nonfat Greek yogurt with 5 g of lemon juice. What changes is the protein, either 150 g of raw chicken breast or 127 g of drained canned chickpeas (half a can), and the starch, either 250 g of raw potatoes, roasted, or 70 g of dry whole-wheat pasta. Two proteins and two starches give four combinations.

Read the table as a swap guide. Changing the starch moves a bowl by only about 55 estimated calories, but changing the protein moves the protein by roughly 25 g. In the chicken bowls about 36% of the estimated calories come from protein, and in the chickpea bowls about 18 to 19%. That is not a flaw, it is the trade you make when you choose a plant protein, and the table shows it before you cook. If you want more protein in a chickpea bowl, use a double portion of the yogurt sauce or swap in chicken for that meal.

Our week uses two of the four: chicken with potatoes for lunch and chickpeas with pasta for dinner. A lunch and a dinner together come to about 1,097 calories and 75 g of protein (estimated), which is two meals, not a full day: breakfast, snacks and drinks are extra, and how much you need over a day depends on you. Our guide to how much protein you need per day shows how to set your own target before you scale a portion.

One shopping list for the whole week

The list is the part that makes the system cheap in time. You convert bowls to raw weights once, add them up, and shop once. The first column is one bowl, so you can scale it to any number of bowls. The second is the starter version: five chicken and potato bowls, one recipe, five lunches. The third is the full week: five chicken and potato bowls plus five chickpea and pasta bowls.

The conversions to kitchen measures come from USDA portion weights: a medium potato is 213 g, a tablespoon of olive oil is 13.5 g, and a can of chickpeas holds 253 g drained. Salt, pepper, garlic powder and dried herbs are not in the numbers because they add almost nothing. If you want a list that also includes the week's breakfasts and the cooking order for other dishes, the guide on a weekly grocery list from a meal plan shows how to merge any set of dishes.

The cooking order: about 90 minutes

The order matters more than the speed. Start the slow items, keep the oven full, and never stand watching one pot. Times below are a budget, not a measurement, because ovens and knives differ. Use a food thermometer for the chicken.

• Minutes 0 to 15. Heat the oven to 425 °F (220 °C). Scrub the potatoes, cut them into 2 cm (3/4 in) cubes and toss them with their share of the oil (for the starter version with no chickpeas, half of the oil, 22.5 g, goes on the potatoes and half on the broccoli; in the full week, 45 g goes on the broccoli, 22.5 g on the potatoes and 22.5 g on the chickpeas, and the pasta gets none). Spread them on the first tray. If you are making the pasta, put a large pot of water on to boil.
• Minutes 15 to 30. Season the chicken and put it on the second tray. Cut the broccoli into florets, toss it with its share of the oil, and keep it on the third tray ready to go in. Keep the raw chicken off the vegetables' tray and board, and wash your hands, the board and the knife with hot soapy water after handling it, before touching the vegetables or any cooked food (FDA safe food handling).
• Minutes 30 to 60. If you are making the second recipe, boil the pasta as the pack says, drain it and spread it on a tray to cool. Drain and rinse the chickpeas and toss them with their 22.5 g of oil. They come cooked from the can, so they are tossed and added to the bowls, not roasted. Put the broccoli in the oven for the second half of the roast.
• Check the chicken. The FDA lists 165 °F (74 °C) as the safe minimum internal temperature for poultry and says a food thermometer is the only way to be sure. Take the breasts out only when the thickest part reads at least that. Time varies with thickness, so trust the thermometer, not the timer.
• Minutes 60 to 90. Slice the chicken, let everything cool for a few minutes, and move to portioning. Wash up while the trays cool.

Cooked weights change, and that matters when you portion. One 150 g raw chicken breast portion becomes about 109 g cooked, from USDA's raw (120 kcal per 100 g) and roasted (165 kcal per 100 g) entries (our arithmetic, estimated; your oven will differ). Dry pasta and raw potatoes also change weight. The simple fix is to weigh the whole cooked batch and divide it into equal portions by weight. Our guide on whether to count macros raw or cooked explains why.

Fridge first, then freezer: the storage plan

This is where official sources disagree slightly, and where we chose the stricter one. The FDA storage chart gives cooked poultry dishes 3 to 4 days in a refrigerator at 40 °F (4 °C) or below and 4 to 6 months in the freezer, and notes that freezing at 0 °F (−18 °C) keeps food safe indefinitely, so its freezer times are for quality only. The UK Food Standards Agency is shorter:

Eat leftovers within 48 hours or freeze them if you think this won’t be possible.

So the plan keeps only the meals eaten within about two days in the fridge: for five lunches, Monday and Tuesday; for the ten-bowl week, three meals. If you finish cooking by about 4 pm on Sunday, Tuesday's lunch is still under 48 hours. Everything else goes in the freezer on Sunday, not in midweek.

• Cool fast. The FDA says to refrigerate or freeze cooked perishables within two hours and to divide large amounts into shallow containers so they cool faster. The FSA says one to two hours.
• Thaw in the fridge. The FSA says to defrost food in the fridge and to use it within 24 hours once it is thawed. Allow a full night in the fridge and check the bowl is completely thawed before reheating; the FSA gives no thawing time. Move both the lunch and the dinner bowl for the next day to the fridge the evening before.
• Reheat until hot all the way through. The FDA lists 165 °F (74 °C) for leftovers and casseroles. The FSA says food that was cooked, frozen and defrosted can only be reheated once, so reheat a whole bowl and do not put leftovers back.
• No rice on purpose. The FSA says to keep cooked rice in the fridge for no more than one day, which does not fit a Sunday cook for Tuesday. Potatoes and pasta avoid the problem.
• Sauce on the day. Stir the yogurt and lemon together when you eat, so nothing has to survive the freezer. Texture after freezing is a matter of taste, so try one container early in the week before you commit to the rest.
• Buy the chicken close to Sunday. The FDA chart gives raw chicken parts only 1 to 2 days in the fridge.

Scaling it: your second and third weeks

Once the starter week feels easy, the system grows in a fixed order, so you never jump from five meals to twenty. First add the second recipe, which is the full week above. Then change one part per week: a new starch, a new vegetable, a new sauce. Because the parts are separate, a swap only changes one line of the list and one row of the table.

The table of four bowls is your template for this. If you replace the broccoli with another vegetable, the calories change by a few dozen at most, but if you replace the olive oil, the change is larger: oil is 884 calories per 100 g in USDA data (estimated), so 9 g is about 80 calories of each bowl. That is the line to watch if a bowl comes out higher than you expected.

If you want to stop planning from scratch each week, that is where a menu helps. MacroRecipe, an iPhone app, plans a week of menus around your estimated calorie and protein targets and gives you one grocery list; when you swap a dish, the portions and the list follow. Who it isn't for: it runs on iPhone only, has no barcode scanner, no food database to search and no complete food diary, though a photo scan of a meal eaten elsewhere comes with the subscription. You can preview your first menu for free, after which it is a paid subscription. If you would rather plan by hand, the guide on how to meal plan for the week in 20 minutes covers the planning step, and our macro-friendly meal prep recipes give you five full recipes once you are comfortable.

How we calculated

Every value is a USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy entry per 100 g, read on 2026-10-27 from the April 2018 CSV release of FoodData Central, by FDC ID: chicken breast raw 171077, chickpeas canned drained 173800, potatoes raw 170026, whole-wheat pasta dry 169738, broccoli raw 170379, nonfat Greek yogurt 170894, olive oil 171413, lemon juice 167747. Calories are USDA's own energy values, never recomputed from macros (the protein shares are protein grams x 4 as a rough share of those calories), and carbohydrates are by difference. We did not weigh anything in a kitchen.

• One bowl. Chicken and potatoes = 150 g chicken (180.0 kcal) + 250 g potatoes (192.5) + 120 g broccoli (40.8) + 9 g oil (79.6) + 50 g yogurt (29.5) + 5 g lemon juice (1.1) = 523.5 kcal before rounding to 523, with 47 g protein (all estimated).
• Chickpea bowl. 127 g chickpeas (176.5 kcal) + 70 g dry pasta (246.4) + the same broccoli, oil and sauce (151.0) = 573.9 kcal, or 574, with 27 g protein (estimated).
• Rounding. Rows are rounded, so a total can differ from the sum of its rows by a calorie or a gram. The lunch plus dinner pair is 1,097 kcal and 74.5 g protein before rounding (estimated).
• Not tested. The cooked weight and the 90 minutes are arithmetic and a budget, not measurements. Your pan, oven and knife skills will give different results.

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