I laughed at meal prepping for months until my grocery bill hit $520

I used to think meal prepping was for fitness influencers and people with way too much Tupperware. Last month I added up my random fast food lunches and dinner runs and it came to $520 for just me. That hurt more than I expected so I tried Sunday prepping with simple stuff like rice bowls and burritos. Three weeks in and I've already saved around $150 on food and I'm not eating sad gas station snacks at 2pm. The part that got me is I actually look forward to opening my fridge and seeing containers ready to go. Has anyone else had that moment where you realize the obvious solution was right there the whole time?

3 comments

3 Comments

rubyk261mo ago

Right when you said "the obvious solution was right there the whole time" it clicked for me. That's honestly how I feel about most of the simple fixes in my life, like realizing I spend way more on things I could just do myself with a little planning. It's like we're all trained to think the complicated route is the only way to solve stuff when really the boring answer works best. Prepping meals, setting a budget, even just writing down what you need to do the next day, it's all the same pattern of slowing down to speed up. Feels like half of being an adult is just catching up to things that were easy all along.

davis.noah1mo ago

About 6 months ago I started keeping a small notebook next to my bed to write down one thing I wanted to get done the next day. @karen361 I hear you on the forgetting part, but for me it's less about the list and more about the act of writing it down that makes me actually do it. The bigger pattern I've noticed is that most people I know, myself included, spend way more energy complaining about not having time than actually blocking out 10 minutes to plan. Like my buddy complains about his messy garage every weekend but won't spend a Saturday just sorting the boxes and calling it done. It's like we get stuck in the mental loop of the problem instead of taking the boring step that fixes it. You ever notice how the stuff we avoid the most is usually the simplest thing to just get over with?

karen3611mo ago

I mean I get what you're saying but I think you're making it sound way bigger than it is. Not everything in life is some hidden simple fix. Sometimes the boring answer is boring because it doesn't actually work for everybody. Like prepping meals sounds great until you have a weird schedule or hate eating the same thing three days in a row. And writing down your to-do list isn't some magical hack, half the time I forget to look at it anyway. It's fine to have these habits but acting like adulthood is just figuring out basic stuff feels like an insult to people who are actually struggling with real hard stuff. Not every problem is just a matter of slowing down.