← All guides

Guide

Meal prep for fat loss.

By Mike Hendriks · Published 31 Jul 2026 · 4 min read

Meal prep for fat loss means one cooking session — about 45 minutes on a Sunday — that turns two base meals and one grocery list into roughly twelve containers. Every weekday lunch and dinner is decided, cooked and portioned before the week starts. It works because it removes in-the-moment food decisions, which is where cuts actually fail: not in the plan, but at 6 pm, hungry, in front of an open fridge.

01Why prep decides the cut

Most cuts don't fail on paper. The plan is fine. They fail in the gap between the plan and dinner — the moment you get home tired and have to decide what to eat right now. A food decision made hungry at 6 pm goes one way, and it isn't the way of the plan.

Prep moves every one of those decisions to Sunday afternoon, when you're fed, calm and rational. You decide once, with a clear head, and for the rest of the week you only execute. A cooked week can't be improvised away: the meal in the container doesn't care how your Tuesday went, and opening a lid is easier than ordering takeaway. That's the entire trick.

02The 45-minute Sunday system

The system is deliberately small. Two meals, one list, one session:

• Pick two base meals. Something like chicken, rice & greens, and an oats & yogurt bowl. Two is enough.
• Generate one grocery list from those two meals. One list, one shop, done.
• Cook in parallel. Rice cooker on, chicken in the oven, veg steaming — the 45 minutes overlap instead of stacking.
• Portion into ~12 containers — lunches and dinners through midweek.
• Label nothing. They're all the same. That's the point.
• Optional Wednesday top-up. Fifteen minutes to cover the back half of the week.

That's the whole job. By Sunday evening the week is stacked in the fridge, and every portion in it was measured by the plan — not by your appetite.

03Repeatable beats fancy

Eating the same meals every day sounds like a failure of imagination. It's a feature. Identical containers give you portion control for free — no weighing, no guessing, no "roughly one serving". They also kill recipe fatigue: you never stand in the kitchen deciding what to cook, because there is nothing to decide.

Variety still exists — it lives in the seasoning, not the shopping cart. Same chicken and rice, different rub, different sauce, different heat. When a base meal genuinely bores you, swap it — but one base meal per week, maximum. Change more than that and you're back to improvising, which is the thing prep exists to prevent.