High protein meal prep: one Sunday, five days, about 100 g of protein a day

High protein meal prep works best as one Sunday of cooking and a freezer, not five days of boxes in the fridge. A turkey chili, a cottage cheese lasagna and four breakfast burritos, with two jars of overnight oats for the first two mornings, give five days at 99 to 100 g of protein by our estimates.

The freezer is the part most meal prep guides leave out. Cooked food keeps 3 to 4 days in the fridge by the US guidance and 48 hours by the UK’s, so a box cooked on Sunday and eaten on Friday is past both. Keep Monday’s meals in the fridge, freeze everything else, and move each day’s boxes down the night before.

The week, meal by meal

Breakfast, lunch and dinner for each day, in that order.

Every day lands within a gram of 100 g, at 1,467 to 1,639 calories. That leaves room for fruit, bread or a snack on most people’s energy budget: the plan covers the protein, not all the food. What is left on Friday night is one bowl of chili, three slices of lasagna and a burrito, which is a head start on the next week.

The four recipes

Figures are per serving, as each recipe is written. The chili, the lasagna and the burritos all freeze. The oats are made the night before, and do not. The chili is the weak box at 25 g, and the Greek yogurt fix in the section on 40 g below adds nearly 10 g without adding a calorie.

Sunday, in the order that works

1. Start the lasagna. Drain the cottage cheese, brown the beef and make the sauce, then layer it and get it into the oven. By the recipe’s own times that is about 50 minutes of work, then 45 to 50 minutes in the oven and 15 to stand.
2. Make the chili while it bakes. Brown the ground turkey (turkey mince) in two batches, then let it simmer uncovered for 35 to 40 minutes.
3. Make the burritos while the chili simmers. About half an hour in one pan. Let them cool completely before you wrap them in foil, or they steam in the foil and the tortillas go soggy.
4. Cook the rice. Six bowls of chili need 360 g of cooked rice, which is roughly 140 g dry.
5. Make two jars of overnight oats, for Monday and Tuesday. Five minutes.
6. Portion and cool. Spoon the chili and rice into shallow boxes so they cool quickly, and get the rice into the freezer within an hour of cooking. Cut the lasagna into eight once it has stood.
7. Fridge for Monday, freezer for the rest. Monday’s chili and lasagna go in the fridge. Everything else goes in the freezer, the burritos included.

That is a little over two hours by the recipes’ own timings, most of it with the oven or a simmering pan doing the work. Each evening after that, move the next day’s boxes from the freezer to the fridge to thaw. The burritos can go straight from the freezer: out of the foil and into the microwave for about 3 minutes, turning once, or still in the foil into a 180C (350F) oven for 25.

How long does meal prep last in the fridge?

It depends which side of the Atlantic you ask.

The US figures are from the FoodSafety.gov cold storage chart, the USDA for reheating, and USDA’s FoodKeeper app for rice, as the University of Maine Cooperative Extension reports it. The UK figures are the Food Standards Agency’s, on leftovers and on rice.

The plan above works under either set of rules. Nothing it serves has been in the fridge for more than 48 hours, the stricter of the two limits, and most of it far less.

Rice is the strictest rule on the UK list, and the one worth understanding. It is not the reheating that makes rice risky, the FSA explains, but how it was stored before: the spores of a bacterium in raw rice survive cooking, and the longer cooked rice sits warm, the more likely it is to make you ill. Cooling it fast and getting it into the freezer within the hour is how the FSA says to stop the bacteria multiplying.

Freezer times are about quality rather than safety. Food kept at -18C (0F) stays safe indefinitely by the FoodSafety.gov chart, though it slowly loses moisture and flavour.

High protein meal prep ideas, and how each one keeps

Three of them reach 40 g as written, and all three freeze. The bolognese and the meatballs freeze as sauce, with the pasta cooked on the day, because reheated pasta never gets its texture back. The lasagna is the exception: it freezes as a whole dish, and the only cost its page records is a cheese layer that loosens a little, which the sauce mostly hides.

The fridge times in that table follow the US guidance, as the recipe pages do. On the UK’s, anything you will not eat within 48 hours belongs in the freezer, which makes the traybake a two-day dish.

How much protein should a meal prep box have?

About 25 to 40 g for most people. The International Society of Sports Nutrition puts it at 20 to 40 g a meal, spread through the day (Jäger and colleagues, 2017), and for a 75 kg person the research on how much one meal can use lands at about 30 g (Schoenfeld and Aragon, 2018). How to hit your protein goal works out your own daily number from your body weight and splits it across your meals.

How to get 40 g of protein in a meal prep box

• Greek yogurt in place of the chili’s sour cream. 100 g of plain nonfat Greek yogurt instead of the 30 g of sour cream takes a bowl from 25 g to about 34 g of protein, with about 5 g less fat, for the same calories.
• Breast in place of thighs. In the traybake or the curry, it adds about 6 g of protein and takes off about 9 g of fat.
• Yogurt in place of the curry’s coconut milk, stirred into each box after reheating, because yogurt splits if it boils: about 8 g more protein and 126 fewer calories. With breast as well, the curry reaches 46 g.
• A glass of milk with breakfast. 250 ml adds about 8 g, which takes a burrito to 46 g.

The yogurt on the chili is the one to start with: no change to the cooking, and nearly 10 g more protein for the same calories. The sour cream substitutes page compares it with the other options, cottage cheese included.

High protein meal prep for weight loss

For weight loss, the useful number is protein per calorie, and the swaps move it further than the choice of recipe does.

Protein per 100 calories, first as each recipe is written, then with every swap on its page switched on.

As written, the oats and the traybake give the most protein for their calories. With every swap on, the curry more than doubles, and three chicken dinners pass 11 g for every 100 calories. The meatballs show the swaps are not free: zucchini ribbons (courgette in the UK) in place of spaghetti take 215 calories off a plate, and 6 g of protein with them.

Each recipe page has the swaps as toggles above the ingredients, so you can switch them on and watch the numbers move. They are the same kind of swap ReciPop’s Pop makes on any recipe.

High protein meal prep that is low carb

Only one recipe here is genuinely low carb as written: the chicken curry, at 15 g of carbs a serving before any rice. The rest carry pasta, rice, potatoes or beans, and their swaps take some of it out rather than all of it. Cauliflower rice takes 14 g off the chili and butternut squash 8 g off the traybake.

The exception is the turkey meatballs with zucchini ribbons in place of the spaghetti, made on the day like the pasta they replace: 18 g of carbs a serving, with 36 g of protein.

Vegetarian high protein meal prep

The burritos and the oats are both vegetarian, which covers breakfast. For lunch and dinner, the high protein mac and cheese carries 31 g a serving and keeps 3 to 4 days in the fridge and 3 to 4 months frozen, by its own page. A vegetarian day of oats, a burrito and the mac and cheese comes to 108 g of protein and about 1,940 calories.

The lasagna soup has a vegetarian version on its page, with lentils in place of the beef, though it gives up about 10 g of protein a bowl in the trade. For vegan meal prep, the tofu scramble bowls in the high protein breakfast meal prep guide carry 40 g, though they do not freeze well.

Where meal prep goes wrong

Rice left to cool slowly. A pan of rice cooling on the hob for the afternoon is the one genuinely risky habit here. Spread it thin and freeze it within the hour.

Yogurt and sour cream added too early. They go on after reheating, not into the box before it freezes. Yogurt that boils in a sauce splits, which is why the curry stirs it in off the heat.

Pasta frozen in its sauce. Pasta keeps drinking the sauce after the heat is off, and a box of it is soft by the time you eat it. Freeze the sauce and cook the pasta on the day, which takes ten minutes.

Reheating twice. Take out one box at a time. The FSA’s advice is to reheat leftovers only once, until steaming hot all the way through.

Where ReciPop fits, and where it does not

ReciPop plans a week of breakfasts, lunches and dinners around your protein target, the time you have and the appliances you own, and every recipe in it shows its protein per serving. It is not built for this kind of week. Its planner rotates through different recipes for each meal, which is the opposite of cooking three things on a Sunday and eating them all week.

For a meal prep week, the plan above is the better tool. The app earns its place in the weeks you cook fresh.

Every figure here is an estimate from USDA values and our own recipes, which are themselves estimates. Why recipe macros are estimates explains how far they move with the brands you buy.