You want to be a healthier person. To get that, you need to decrease chaos. To decrease chaos, you need good habits. To get good habits, you need systems.

This blog is not about which nutrition plan is right for you. I am not going to tell you if paleo or keto is better. I am not going to tell you how to count your macros and your micros to optimize your diet.

I am here to talk about the habits revolving around your diet. I believe if you can build systems around eating, you can solve almost all of your nutrition problems.

How Do Poor Diet Habits Happen?

To make healthier decisions, you want to decrease complexity in your life. You want to make simple and effective decisions quickly and without much thought energy. You are a primal creature. You have three basic needs: food, water, and shelter. If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, the energy expended thinking about it can become overwhelming.

Some of our worst eating decisions happen at night when our energy levels are at our lowest.

You've probably had one of these thoughts late in the day:

I shouldn't have anything else to eat for the day but I’d rather have a cookie.

I'm just going to pick up something quick on the way home instead of cooking.

I shouldn't be in the pantry right now, but here I am.

If you decrease the decision energy it takes to eat throughout the day, you may have saved yourself the crucial amount of mental fuel it takes to say "no" to those late night, high calorie snacks.

What People Struggle With When It Comes To Diet?

People don’t struggle with what to eat nearly as much as they struggle with consistency in their eating schedule. People skip breakfast, lunch, or dinner because they couldn’t find the time throughout their day to eat them. This inconsistency causes more problems than they appreciate. Of course, there are physiological concerns here too, but I am not here to talk about that.

If you didn’t have time to make breakfast, what was the chance that you had time to pack a lunch? Probably close to zero. Now you’re going to McDonald’s on your lunch break.

If you skipped dinner, what is the percent chance you got hungry at 8 p.m. and opened the snack cabinet and grabbed the chips and salsa? Probably close to 100.

How about waking up in the middle of the night and cracking into the Oreos? Could that have been prevented if you had a full meal around 6 p.m.? The answer is probably yes.

Notice how quickly your food choices deteriorate once you are inconsistent on when you eat. As a personal trainer, this is one of the biggest problems I see. Most people make okay choices when it comes to their meals (when they have the time to think about them and prepare them). Notice, I said okay. I did not say great. I did not say optimal. However, these okay choices are better than what ends up happening. Okay can be improved upon. If you only have time for McDonald’s on your lunch break, there is little room for improvement.

Inconsistency on when you eat turns into bad food choices. It also turns into one of the worst habits you can have when it comes to improving your nutrition: snacking. Unless you are trying to gain weight as an athlete, you need to drop the habit of snacking altogether. Snacking becomes binge eating. And binge eating calories can add up to enormous totals.

The solution to the problem is creating an appropriate eating schedule. “I’m going to have a good breakfast, lunch, and dinner at these specific times.” This is only part of the story. To do those things, you need time. You need time to make breakfast in the morning. You need time to prepare lunch. You need time to cook dinner.

There is an easy answer to the time equation. If instead of cooking each of these meals individually, cook them at the same time on the same day when all of the food is in front of you and fresh from the grocery store.

Yes, I am talking about meal prepping. And it is a lifesaver.

What Are The Benefits Of Meal Prepping?

Meal prepping is a great habit to create. Once you do it once, you'll realize the immense benefits for the next seven days. It’s not like exercising where you have to do it everyday and results come slow after long periods of hard work. Meal prepping is less work than the work you’re already doing to prepare food and the results are immediate.

The toughest part is what to cook. That’s on you. Go to a nutritionist or experiment with well-researched and regarded nutritional plans until you find what works for you and your goals. Meal prepping will also allow you to test your diet’s effectiveness easily. The results of the tests are easy to conclude. You can extrapolate the meaning in the data quickly and readjust for the next week.

How did I feel after today? (Hungry? Stomach Pain? Strange Bowel Movements? Etc.)

How did I feel after this week? (More energy? Less? Bloated? Etc.)

Did I get closer to my goal? (Improved body composition, decreased weight, increased weight, improved blood pressure, improved sense of well being, etc.)

If you answer these three questions after each week, you can keep reimagining your meal prep until you’ve solved for most of the variables you’re looking to control.

How else is meal prepping valuable?

If you cook all of the meals you need for the week, then you don’t need to think for the rest of the week about what you’re going to eat. You reach into the fridge, grab your food, eat, and go.

You also don’t have to spend any more time in the morning preparing.

You also don’t need hours to cook, eat, and clean dishes when you get home.

You don’t need to clean dishes as often. All you need to do is put Tupperware in the dishwasher.

You don’t need to spend $5 in delivery fees on DoorDash to get McDonald’s sent to the office.

You don’t need to go to the grocery store in the middle of the week because you forgot cantaloupes, again.

You don’t need to decide between breakfast or lunch, because you only have time for one.

You don’t have to sit on the couch with hunger pangs because you didn’t have the energy to cook after work.

You don’t have to remember to thaw the T-bones.

Do you get the point yet?

How To Meal Prep

I won’t tell you what to eat. There's a lot of different strategies out there. And unfortunately, there's very little good data that is conclusive on the optimal diet for humans. That means, my meal prep strategy will look different then yours (maybe I'll cut my vegetables first, then start the grill. Meanwhile, you plan on baking). That means I can’t tell you how to prepare the food you will eat. However, I can tell you the steps of the process on your journey to creating the perfect meal prep.

Step 1: Choose A Nutritional Pathway

The first step is deciding what you are going to eat. This needs to be deliberate. You need to think about what you want to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it.

The highest success-rate option is to see a nutritionist, get a blood chemistry analysis, and have them prescribe you a specific meal plan based on your needs and goals.

The second best option is analyzing your past dieting habits. Determine what has worked well for you and heavily research nutritional information until you’ve found a plan that may work. This plan needs to have specific meals with macronutrient values and a grocery list. You also want to make sure that when you look at your plan, it's food that you can see yourself eating forever. No 3-month quick-fix diet regimens.

The third option is winging it. Don’t do that. Before you meal prep, you need a plan and a shopping list.

Step 2: Buy The Food On Your List

This might seem simple but some people over complicate the process. They believe meal prepping is too hard. Or, they don’t think at all about it, screw up the whole week, and lose faith in the system (of meal prepping).

There are three rules when shopping to meal prep:

Rule One: Shop and prep the same day.

I see rule number one screwed up often. People don’t make the time to shop in its entirety. Or, they do all their shopping on a Sunday night and have work Monday morning. Or, they do their shopping on a Sunday afternoon, cook for two hours, and then realize they don’t have enough time to finish the process. Plan well. Don’t impartially prepare.

Rule Two: Don’t forget anything.

If you forget something, you probably didn’t have your list with you. Shame on you.

Rule Three: Do it quickly.

The whole goal of meal prepping is to save you time. If you’re in the grocery store for three hours and then you’re cooking for another seven, you’ve defeated the purpose. Or, you’ve saved yourself some time because if that sounds like you, you’re probably a sloth all of the time, not just on meal prep day.

To put it in perspective, I’m in and out of the grocery store in fifteen minutes. I get everything I need, and I don't go back to the store until the following week. If you know what you need and where it is, why should it take you any longer?

Step 3: Prep

Your goal is to make X amount of meals. X is the total amount of meals you need for the week, subtracting those that you might want to cook fresh so you’re not always eating out of the microwave. I personally cook dinner every Saturday and Sunday night. I enjoy the process. And I look forward to a freshly cooked meal.

If you do what I do, you will need to prepare 12 meals. That is 6 lunches and 6 dinners (I don't eat breakfast). That means you’ll have two lunches/dinners to cook. You don’t have to do that. You can cook 21 meals. You can cook 7. The goal is to prepare as many meals as possible so that eating and thinking about eating are no longer a burden on you. Think about which meals you are least consistent about (probably lunch and dinner), and prepare those.

The first few weeks will be tougher. You’re going to stumble a bit. You’ll burn the asparagus because you forgot to set the timer. The ground beef is going to be medium and you needed it to be medium rare. You’ll leave the pasta in the pot for too long because you were too busy chopping the onions.

The goal is to build a system. You’ll spend years readjusting what you eat, how it is prepared, and in what order you’ll prepare it. I've been meal prepping for 5 years and still make changes every few weeks. However, within about a month, you’ll be finishing your meal prep within two hours and saving yourself many more on the back end.

Step 4: Eat

At the end of the day, you actually have to consume the meals that you’ve prepared. That means you’ll probably need to make sure you remember to pack your lunch now that you’ve made it. That means that if you didn’t like that salmon dish you made and have two more of them, you’ll have to suck it up and deal with it until the end of the week.

The worst part about meal prepping is realizing you made something you don’t like. This is amplified when you’ve duplicated the meals for an entire week. You know you have four more of the same meal waiting to be eaten, yet you’re dreading it. This is part of the learning process. Over time you’ll get better. This will happen less frequently.

If you’re inconsistent with whether or not you actually eat the meals, in due time, you’ll give up. You’ll think it’s not for you. Just remember, it’s not meal prepping that isn’t for you, it’s how you’re meal prepping. There is a combination of meals that works perfect for your body and your goals, works for your life’s schedule, is easy to make, and you’ll enjoy eating. I’ve had many weeks of bad meal preps. I never gave up. I've probably missed 5 weeks of meal prepping in 5 years. I just readjusted.

Where To Start

Building good habits is not easy. If it was, everyone would be happy, fit, stress free, rich, and have immaculate relationships. But, that isn’t life. The best way to build good habits is to break it down to small, accomplishable tasks. When it comes to building habits around nutrition, the meal prep is an incredible tool. However, getting to the point of being years into meal prepping and knowing exactly what to eat does not happen overnight (I said in this sentence that it takes years).

If you’re not doing any of these things currently, where should you start? The best place to start is with a plan. Meet with a nutritionist (highly advised) or do the research yourself. Come up with a highly specific plan that you think will work for you. Make sure you have all of the pieces, down to the exact aggregate of olive oil. Once you have that, meal prepping is a breeze.

After the first few months, you'll wonder how you got so far without it.

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