How do you say ‘I’m in my mid-30s’ without saying ‘I’m in my mid-30s’? The answer is meal-prep

I never thought I would be this person yet here I am: I love meal-prep. I love it so much.

I love planning out a week of meals, shopping for the ingredients, spending a Sunday cooking it all and dividing it into neat little containers. I love eating the same thing for days in a row, knowing exactly what I’m getting. Heck, I love eating the same breakfast five days a week every single week and not getting sick of it. Meal-prep – I love it!

Mastering the art of cooking for one is a project that’s taken me many years.Credit: iStock

Some of you may already be familiar with the joys of meal-prep. It’s the top thing on those annoying productivity life-hack listicles of what to do so you have your life together. It’s what all the smug TikTok girlies do in their “day in the life” videos. It’s on every single recipe page these days. There are whole books about it.

Meal-prep is so great that even though it’s talked about so much, even though everyone knows what it is, I think people need to talk about it more and do it more. Getting super into meal-prep has changed my life in many ways and I’m not afraid to shout it from the rooftop. (Tell me you’re in your mid-30s without telling me you’re in your mid-30s.)

Living alone and working mostly from home, as I do, cooking and eating well can be a challenge. Mastering the art of cooking for one is a project that’s taken me many years: you have to be sure it’s not something you’ll get tired of eating and that it will keep (or freeze) well.

Add being vegan to that, and a lot of people’s go-to recipes are off-limits to me. The sad meals I made when I first moved out of home, started living in share houses and learnt how to cook for myself (a tin of tomatoes, a tin of chickpeas, onion, garlic and a chopped capsicum if I felt fancy – all popped in the saucepan, stirred around, done) no longer cut it.

A peek behind the (fridge) door: It’s become a joy to connect with others in this way.Credit: Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

I started out small by cooking a meal and then eating the leftovers for a few days. Sounds simple and obvious but it kind of surprised me how much of a difference it made for me, mentally, to not have to decide every day on what to eat. Then I levelled up: I bought a whiteboard from Kmart to stick on the fridge and wrote the weekdays on it, splitting days into lunch and dinner. It became a ritual to plan out the entire week before going to the shops to get my groceries.

But the real kicker was being diagnosed with prediabetes. Diabetes runs in my family, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise, but I was also a little shocked – I thought I’d been eating pretty healthily, all things considered. I started reading about what would help, health-wise – the foods to eat more of, the foods to keep an eye on – and a little lightbulb went on in my head. This was the perfect thing to meal-prep for.

So I added breakfast into the rotation too: a tofu scramble with spinach to get a big boost of protein and greens in the morning and keep me full through to lunchtime. I haven’t got sick of it once, and it’s been a lot of fun to find new variations by using different spices, toppings and my large collection of hot sauces.

I am nothing if not a chronic oversharer, so the final step in my meal-prep journey was to start posting photos of my fridge every week to my Instagram stories, meticulously labelling everything to show just how much of an organised adult I am. In all seriousness, it’s become a joy to connect with others in this way.

For them, I suspect there’s some voyeuristic pleasure – who doesn’t love peeping into other people’s everyday lives? – but also something like inspiration, as many friends have told me it’s pushed them to start meal-prepping, too. It makes me feel happy to know that others have adopted healthy habits because of me, even more so when they send me photos of their fridges and neat little containers.

Believe me, I hate self-congratulatory jerks who talk about “adulting”, too, so I know how annoying this all sounds. If the me of a year ago read this article, I’d be rolling my eyes as well.

But my life now is divided into BMP and AMP (before and after, obvs). No amount of watching obnoxious Instagram reels could have prepared me for how much satisfaction meal-prep brings me. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to eat my pre-prepared lunch.

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