I tried the marathon version of meal prep exactly twice. Sunday afternoon, seven days of chicken and rice portioned into fourteen labeled containers, three hours standing at the counter while my kids asked where I’d disappeared to. Both times I quit by Wednesday, because eating the identical lunch five days in a row made me want to throw the tupperware across the kitchen.

Here’s what I actually do now, seven months in, sitting at 208 pounds after starting at 232: I prep two meals. Not seven.

Every Sunday I make one big “anchor” batch — usually 3 pounds of chicken thighs, two cups of dry rice, and a sheet pan of roasted broccoli or green beans. Forty-five minutes total, most of it hands-off oven time. That covers lunch Monday through Thursday, portioned into four containers, and I’m done thinking about lunch for the week. Then I prep one dinner base — a big pot of turkey chili or a tray of baked salmon — which gives me two or three dinners I can pull straight from the fridge on the nights I don’t feel like cooking.

That’s eight to ten meals prepped out of twenty-one. Breakfast and the rest of dinner I freestyle completely — whatever I’m in the mood for, whatever my family’s having, whatever a restaurant puts in front of me.

The reason this works where the marathon version didn’t: it kills the exact friction I actually hate — decision fatigue at 6pm on a random Tuesday — without asking me to be a robot who eats identical meals for a week straight. I get bored fast. Always have. My old idea of “discipline” meant fighting that boredom with willpower, and willpower loses to a bored brain every single time. Half a week of structure is enough to remove the decision, and half a week of freedom is enough to keep me from mutinying against my own lunch.

The freestyle half is where ZeroToHero (zerotoherofit.com) actually earns its keep. I built it because I got sick of doing mental math on whether something “fit” — so now I just snap a photo of whatever’s in front of me, the chili I prepped or the taco truck plate I didn’t plan for, and it handles the logging. I’m not maintaining a spreadsheet of allowed foods. I’m documenting what actually happened and letting the pattern show up over weeks, not individual meals.

The numbers back this up more than I expected. During my full-week-prep phase, my logging streak hovered around 60%, because by Thursday I resented my own lunch enough to skip logging it out of spite — which sounds ridiculous typing it out, but it’s exactly what happened. Over the last two months, prepping half as much food, I’ve logged 91% of days. Fewer meals prepped, better adherence, and the scale kept moving the same direction it had been.

There’s a version of this that’s about grocery cost too — batching two proteins instead of seven ingredient lists means I’m buying in bulk for exactly two dishes, which has quietly cut what I spend on groceries even though I’m eating out more than I used to, not less.

If you’re stuck between “meal prep everything” and “meal prep nothing,” there’s a middle lane nobody talks about. Pick one lunch and one dinner base you actually like enough to eat three or four times in a row. Batch those, Sunday, forty-five minutes. Leave the rest of the week completely alone. You’ll spend less time in the kitchen than the all-or-nothing version, and you’re a lot less likely to bail on it by Wednesday — because I did, twice, before I figured that out.