7 Reasons I Stopped Meal Prepping and What I Quietly Do Instead

My family and I have been meal prepping for about 6 months now and the results have been great. There are lots of unknowns heading into a project like this— for example, would we like the taste of food prepped that far in advance? Would it get boring to eat the same thing all week? Would it be a ton of work upfront or overwhelm us with dishes?

It turns out that we did have to adjust our system, but we also discovered a few tweaks that made the whole meal prep method work even better for us. For one, we no longer meal prep breakfast or lunch, which hasn’t been as much of a burden as I thought. We actually love the variety this brings to our lives and the freedom to pick whatever on a whim. Without further ado, here are the seven reasons we stopped meal prepping breakfast and lunch.

The hassle isn’t worth it for individual servings

In our experience, meal prepping doesn’t really result in time savings when you make individual sized portions over a long period of time. This is probably why the vast majority of meal prepping articles you read online are about lunch preps, where the economics of efficiency are better. You’re probably better off processing your parts in a single category, like having chopped vegetables or having some protein on hand that can quickly be thrown into a dish.

We still had breakfast and lunch dishes

Meal prepping for dinner means that virtually all of the time washing dishes is eliminated. Even though we try to use as few dishes as possible when we prep breakfast and lunch, we still end up needing two plates per person per meal, on average. And while that’s still better than in a typical scenario, it was less of a game changer in our lives.

We prefer more variety for our breakfast and lunch food

We’re all about simplicity and order when it comes to the subject of meal prepping. But we also love the fact that our evenings are more relaxed with the family. It saves up 30 minutes a day of cooking and cleaning is a huge boost to our happiness. We don’t want to necessarily expand this across the day and require all meals to be planned ahead. One of the simple pleasures of life is deciding for the moment what you’re in the mood for, and then having it delivered or cooking it fresh. You never want to adjust your life so severely that you start feeling deprived.

We graze more on breakfast and lunch

Another reason we stopped meal prepping for breakfast and lunch is that we simply like to graze during the day. While we structure our days so that everyone is at home and meals are taken together, we don’t demand that everyone eats cold at the same time. We don’t have set times for when breakfast and lunch will be finished, but instead, like to let our appetite guide us, and eat when we’re naturally hungry.

Not interested in counting calories

Dinner is a meal that my wife and I typically eat together and it’s easy to portion out exactly what everyone needs. You can be more exact with your budgeting and how long the meals will last, since prep food gets eaten late in the day, you’ll know how much is left. But with our breakfast and lunch, it’s a little more freewheeling. Sometimes we feel like eating a bigger meal and sometimes we feel like snacking throughout the afternoon. We love that freedom, and don’t like the idea of making ourselves only eat what was prepped before that week.

Not all foods age equally well

Admittedly, meal prepping works better for dinner than it does for breakfast and lunch, and this is only a preference. It has more to do with the type of foods that we like to eat for the different meals. My wife and I love eating breakfast foods, extremely fresh, right after they’ve been cooked. For example, my wife is currently on a toast kick, where she loves to make toast with her favorite toppings for breakfast. I really enjoy eating bacon and eggs, and sometimes my kids and I will make pancakes from scratch for a fun afternoon snack. These type of foods are best enjoyed fresh, and don’t really fit into our meal prep lifestyle.

Flavors that get old fast

Another thing to consider is that it’s easier for us to eat the same meal for dinner five nights in a row. I think this is because we enjoy dinner more than any other meal and are willing to sacrifice in other areas of our lives to protect the enjoyment and simplicity of this activity. But with breakfast and lunch, we’re less likely to eat the same meal every single day. In fact, one of my simple pleasures is deciding what I’ll eat for lunch, based on my mood. That can sometimes mean it’s a heavier meal if I’m really hungry or I might skip lunch altogether if I had a huge breakfast and I’m not hungry yet. I don’t want to give this flexibility up, and so meal prepping for breakfast and lunch ends up being more like a cage than the freedom that has brought me in the evenings.

Stay Flexible and Customize to Your Own Life

As you can see, there are lots of tailored downsides to meal prepping breakfast and lunch, that for now, suggest that we’re going to stick with our current system of only meal prepping dinner. Meal prepping dinner has been a huge success, and for now, we want to enjoy the simple pleasures that the rest of our day-to-day offer us in terms of food. Maybe as our life circumstances change or we get busier, we’ll consider meal prepping more meals as a way to simplify our lives, but for now, we are perfectly content with the balance we have struck.