If you haven’t heard of meal prepping, you probably haven’t been on the internet lately. Meal prepping once meant making your lunch for tomorrow, but now it means making your breakfast, lunch and dinner for the entire week.

Let’s face it; students don’t have much time to cook, nor do they have the disposable income to buy meals all the time. This is why meal prepping has become such a phenomenon. You only have to dedicate one morning, afternoon or night to prepare your meals for the week.

This makes it easier to control your portions, saves time during the week, and will help you make some affordable, healthier choices.

Thankfully, YouTube has given us the gift of countless meal prep recipes — these tend to be even easier to follow than standard recipes as you can actually watch how these cooks are making their meals. Recipes in video format can also help you pick up some nifty tips and tricks to make the overall meal prep process easier.

Keep in mind you can always use the oven or a pan to heat up your meals if you are anti-microwave. Here are some of our favourite meal prep recipes to get you through the week:

Easy Meal Prep:

Before we get you started, check out this incredible intro to meal prepping video from one of our favourite Canadian YouTubers, HealthNutNutrition!

Breakfast Meal Prep

Healthy Breakfasts: Mini Egg Frittatas Kale & Sweet Potato, Baked Oatmeal & Apple Chips, Protein-Packed Parfait

Healthy eating is usually associated with some serious time commitment, but these healthy recipes just go to show that with meal prep, you can eat healthy all week fuss-free!

Vegan Breakfasts: Samosa wraps, Frozen yogurt bars, Granola

While these recipes actually require a little bit more than others, they are vegan, incredibly unique and worth the try!

The thing is, the more meal prepping you do, the more you can try new things and cycle in different meals through the month.

Easy Breakfasts:

Tasty is an incredible source for different meal prep recipes! Honestly, they make everything look so easy, and delicious!

Lunch Meal Prep

Four Lunches: Honey Sesame Chicken Lunch Bowls, Turkey Taco Lunch Bowls, Sweet Potato Lentil Jar Salads, Chicken Fajita Lunch Bowls

We love this video that gives us four great lunch recipes - one per month! Or, if you have roommates, you can each make one recipe and trade them off throughout the week!

Just the Ingredients:

If you are someone who gets bored easily, you can try to just meal prep a variety of ingredients — i.e. your proteins (steak, chicken), and your base (rice, quinoa). This way, you can mix these ingredients in different variations over the week.

Dinner Meal Prep

Chicken-Based Recipes: Chicken Broccoli Rice , Chicken Fajitas , Chicken Parm , Chicken Nuggets

Chicken can be a pain to cook — especially when you are coming home at 7 pm after class. Check out these chicken meal prep recipes that will help you get all your dinners out of the way before the week even starts!