How Meal Prepping Ruins Your Life

You’re in your mid-twenties. You realize you’ve gained thirty pounds since you started Door Dashing a Wendy’s 4 for 4 every day. A quick Google search reveals that meal prepping will make you slimmer, healthier, and over time, able to voluntarily leave your couch. Off to the grocery store you go. Your neighbor stares at you in shock: you haven’t left your house in a week. You’re thinking, “Yes! Finally, I can be healthy,” “This will save me time and money,” and “I can’t wait to look like John Cena if he was 5’4.”

As you walk the frozen food aisle you notice a fitness trainer buying an entire cart full of frozen, bagged chicken. You can tell he lifts weights based on his skintight pants and leg cleavage. “He must be meal prepping,” you think. You inquire and spark a conversation. “Meal prepping was the best decision I ever made,” he screams. He offers you a discount at his home gym, which he calls “Grunt.” He intimidates you and your frail body, and you don’t want to go to his home gym, so you silently walk away.

You buy five chicken thighs, some rice, and a whole lot of asparagus. As you’re checking out you realize you have no food containers. How will you store the meals once you’ve prepped them? In a shoebox? You sprint towards the container aisle. You lose your breath. You sit down for five minutes to catch it again. There are hundreds of container sizes, lid colors; all disorganized. “Whoa,” you whisper in fright. An employee laughs as if she purposely jumbled the containers. You’re confused, lost, and starving, so you try to make this quick. Square ones, round ones, deep ones, shallow ones. What are these, types of hotel pools? None of the lids fit any of the containers. You’re reminded of how bad you are at Tetris. Finally, twenty minutes and a self-motivational talk later, you find five containers with matching lids. People stare, but you don’t care, because you’re a meal prepping machine.

Once you arrive back home, you unpack everything and prepare the kitchen. You clean the spider webs off your pans. The chicken is properly seasoned and cooking. The rice is in the rice cooker. The asparagus… oh, no. The asparagus. You’ve bought too much asparagus, a common mistake for a beginner meal prepper. You have twenty asparaguses for each meal. Rubbing your head in confusion you think, “Can I return them?” But you soon realize you must do the unthinkable and consume an abundance of asparagus every day for a week. Accepting this is a challenge for you, but you fight through the insecurities and call it an “asparagus salad.”

Soon the rice is done, the 100 asparaguses are out of the oven, and the chicken is dreadful. Examining your various spices, you notice an irregularity: you’ve seasoned your chicken with pepper, paprika, garlic powder, and sugar. You expected to impress your racially ambiguous friend, Ryan, with your seasoning choices, but now you’re ashamed, and you make yourself a hefty alcoholic beverage. Meal prepping has already begun to change you.

As tears pour down your face, you push on, because you’re a meal prepper now. This is the life you’ve chosen. You talk yourself into eating the rest of the meal, but soon you realize you’ve made four more sugar chickens. You facepalm in regret. Someone knocks on your door. It’s your neighbor, your mom, with a fresh meal. Slamming the door in anger you scream, “You never taught me how to cook!” But deep down, you know the sugar wasn’t her fault. It was your stupidity.

The crying continues and nausea strikes as you eat the sugared chicken, twenty asparaguses, and plain white rice… which isn’t bad, by the way. As you forcibly shove the tenth asparagus in your mouth you receive a phone call. “A break,” you whisper in relief. It’s your friend Lisa asking you out to dinner tomorrow night. Though you want to say yes, you must sadly decline, as you’ve prepared mediocre dinners for five straight nights. “Lisa, I no longer have a social life. I am a meal prepper. Goodbye forever.” A call end tone shows Lisa you are serious, and she never hears from you again.

A week goes by and after a bunch of gagging, crying, and lunchtime calls to your therapist, you finally finish all the meals. Each one was worse than the last. You have an alarming sugar high, so much so that your eyesight has dissipated. You are in pain, have three cavities, and your tastebuds have sent you a letter of resignation. You think about calling Lisa, but she must never know about the sugar chickens. Saddened, you sit on your couch in silence. Minutes later, your DoorDash Wendy’s order arrives.