Meal Prepping for Medical School

If you want to push yourself in medicine and research to truly perform at your absolute best, you must familiarize yourself with performance science. This tells us that our sleep, nutrition, exercise, work habits, environment, community, emotional health, joy, self talk, and relationships, have enormous impacts on our performance. I believe meal prepping is an incredibly high yield component to this, where minimal time investment can result in massive time saving as well as improvement in your health.

In this post I’m going to outline some strategies/considerations for implementing meal prepping in your life as a medical, graduate, or undergraduate student, using examples of successes/failures I’ve experienced myself to highlight lessons that will hopefully save you time.

Requisites for Meal Prepping:

Having access to a freezer and freezable containers is an important requisite to meal prep. I don’t like to increase risk of foodborne illness by letting stuff sit in my fridge for extended periods, so I freeze all of my meals and thaw them one at a time as needed. 

Deciding the actual foods you should incorporate into your meal prep gets at the vast world of nutrition, and is beyond the scope of this post. The mediterranean diet or vegan diet with proper vitamin/mineral supplementation appear to be generally the healthiest diets in the world based on an enormous body of evidence. However, based on your health conditions, body, preferences, and exercise, you should consult a trusted primary care physician or dietician for evidence-based recommendations on what diet would likely be healthiest for you. I try to adopt the mediterranean diet, emphasizing lots of plant-based foods, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, healthy fats, avoidance of red meat, low dairy, low sodium, moderate fish and chicken, and complex carbohydrates rather than simple sugars.

Getting Started: Freezer + Freezable Containers

Target sells good quality and relatively cheap freezers that will allow you to organize and store many prepped meals: 

Amazon has good freezable glass containers that you can freeze prepped meals in. These specific ones (https://www.amazon.com/Containers-Lifetime-Container-Microwave-Dishwasher/dp/B07BSB87FL) have worked well for me. 

Daily Fruit + Chia Seed Smoothies:

I’ve tried many different types of freezable smoothie containers, and below are the ones I’ve found to be the best. The reason I like these is because they’re easy to wash/clean and have lids only made of plastic that seal well. Previously I tried containers with metal lids, but these always developed rust within just a couple uses.

Most grocery stores have a selection of frozen fruits you can buy in bags. To blend up fruit, if you’re able, invest in a high-quality blender. I’ve never had a bad Ninja blender before and they seem to last a long time, handling a large amount of frozen fruit I repeatedly challenge them with in big batches for years. These daily fruit smoothies are delicious, and in previous years I got a little too carried away with fruit diversity or not-so-tasty combinations, but I now keep them relatively simple, mixing together some frozen fruit mixes containing strawberries, mangoes, bananas, and pineapple. It takes some time to figure out your flow with how much water to add after adding your frozen fruit to the blender (hint: use super hot water and fill it all the way up once, strain out that water, and then add more hot water until ~⅓ to halfway up if you have a full container of fruit, then blend. The blender will have an easier time this way if the fruit isn’t hard as rock), but stick with it and you will develop a sense for it with time! 

Protein Shakes: 

This isn’t really meal prep but I wanted to include it here because this is an important part of my daily nutrition. I’ve tried a lot of protein shakes, and whey often upsets my stomach, whereas I tend to handle plant protein much better. These shakes below are available on Amazon, have a solid 32 grams of protein, taste actually good (not chalky), and I get one delivered every month. Yes they’re a little pricey but this is a lot of protein and a good investment particularly for exercise recovery.

Meal Prepping Lunches

The lunches I meal prep have become simpler over time - in the past I was too ambitious in the complexity or in the amount (i.e. prepping a whole month of the same meal) of food I’m prepping, and now just throw together what I’ll walk you through below for ~7 days worth of meals. I include significant portions of veggies, rice, beans, and another protein such as chicken. Below is an example of satisfying those types of foods using microwavable bags that are readily available at grocery stores. It is very quick to heat up the ingredients individually and then disperse them as you like into meal prep containers that you can then freeze down and thaw out whenever you need.

Meal prepping sets you up so that even (especially) if you are extremely busy and have to fly out the door the moment you wake up, a healthy breakfast and lunch are taken care of and you don’t have to think about them at all. This will save you an large amount of time otherwise spent on deciding where to get food, traveling there, waiting in line, etc.

One final bit of advice: if you are adding a new habit or changing a habit, make small changes that you consistently stick with, rather than trying to redefine your entire eating habits overnight. If your meal prep process is too complicated or you’re overly ambitious with how much change you can reasonably make in a short amount of time, it might set you up for disappointment. Instead, make very small changes that you stick with, give yourself compassion/empathy as you try things and make mistakes, and this will build the momentum needed to make this a lasting change incorporated into your lifestyle.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful, and good luck on your meal prep journey!