I’ve never been a fan of traditional meal prep.

The idea of spending hours on Sunday cooking a week’s worth of food, and then eating meals on Friday that have just been sitting in the fridge for 5 days, doesn’t appeal to me.

If you’ve felt the same way, I want to share how I’ve simplified my approach. I focus on having a system that keeps me eating fresh, healthy meals without the stress of traditional meal prep.

Here’s how I make it work for lunch, dinner, and grocery shopping.

Lunch: A high-protein, flexible approach

I usually skip breakfast (because all the cool kids are intermittent fasting these days) and make my lunch around 11 AM.

My go-to is:

• A bed of spring mix
• Protein (bacon, eggs, or leftover meat from dinner)
• Refried black beans
• Shredded cheese
• Salsa

PRO TIP:

I time my lunch prep around my meetings. If I have a meeting at 11, I’ll start making lunch 10 minutes before so I can finish just as the meeting starts and eat while I’m listening.

I know some people apologize for eating on calls but I think that's dumb. If we worked in an office, we'd literally be eating together during meetings at lunch time.

Plus eating lunch during a meeting frees up time later for a midday run or workout.

Dinner: A rotating menu of go-to meals

For dinner, we’ve narrowed down a list of 7–8 go-to meals that we rotate through each week. We don't care that it's repetitive. That's the point. It makes things so much simpler.

Here's my list:

A lot of these meals make great leftovers, which means lunch the next day is even faster.

Grocery shopping made easy

To streamline shopping, we order our groceries online and use saved meal-specific lists.

For example, I’ve saved a “Fajita Night” list in the app, so when I’m planning for the week, I can just pull it up, select what we need, and skip the stuff we already have.

It cuts the decision-making time way down and I'm able to finish my 'shopping' in about 10 minutes.

To easily remember what we're eating each night, we also write all of our planned meals for the week on a dry-erase calendar on the fridge.

And then we do curbside pickup on Saturday mornings.

Why this system works

Here’s why this approach has been such a great for me:

• Saves time. Lunch during meetings means more time for workouts. Grocery lists and a meal calendar simplify planning.
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• Keeps eating healthy manageable. Having a few staple meals on rotation means that we actually enjoy makes it easy to make healthy eating a habit.
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• Leaves room for flexibility. Mixing and matching my lunch protein from leftovers is all the variety I need. And some days, we just decide it's a Chik-Fil-A night if we don't want to cook.

Try it out if you're sick of eating 5-day old leftovers.

Other things I wish I knew

Nixing the meal prepping is actually one of the things I wish I knew before I became a WFH dad.

To hear 9 other things I wish I knew, check out this video:

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Recommendation of the week

​Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms​

This has been a great read on what it looks like to practice Christian habits amidst the chaos of raising little children. It gives ideas of what habits could look like up in the morning, at mealtimes, for discipline, screentime, and more.

One idea I've started implementing is in the 'waking' section. In an effort to not look at my phone first thing in the morning, the author talks about how as he wakes up, he kneels down and says a short prayer before anything. I've started to do that.

My prayer is usually:

God, thank you for the mercy of a new day. Please give me the wisdom, strength, and steps to do the work you've called me to do today. Amen.

There's nothing magical about this prayer, but it's an opportunity to center my mind on what's important first thing in the morning.

What about you?

How do you manage meals while working from home?

Email me at thom@wfhdads.com and let me know. I read and respond to each one.

Thanks again for being a part of this community!

Thom Gibson Founder of WFH Dads ​​​

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