The Ultimate Nutrition Hack for Busy Professionals: Why You Should Hire a Meal Prep Service

Medically reviewed by Dr. Dan Wool, NMD, Arizona-licensed Naturopathic Physician

TL;DR Summary:

What Are Meal Prep Services and Why They're Essential: Meal prep services are organizations delivering pre-prepared healthy meals to homes, offices, or storefronts, with natural markets like Sprouts and Whole Foods offering frozen meal sections. Busy professionals often skip breakfast and lunch, becoming starving by late afternoon leading to unhealthy fast food choices like Panda Express or Chipotle lacking proper nutrition. Services like Eat Clean Phoenix provide whole foods meals with balanced protein, starch, and vegetables—for example, buffalo chicken sweet potato with coleslaw containing 400 calories delivering complete nutrition without cooking time.
Meal Prep Service Benefits and Learning Opportunities: Using meal prep services for 2-3 weeks creates meal blueprint teaching sustainable cooking skills. After month-long use, customers identify favorite meals realizing "I can make that" with simple ingredients like baked sweet potatoes, shredded chicken, and vegetables, building cooking repertoire. Services accommodate various dietary needs including Paleo, Autoimmune Paleo, diabetic-friendly, and gluten-free options respecting food allergies. Private chefs offer alternative permutation providing personalized meal preparation and home delivery similar to meal prep services for accessible pricing.
Cost-Effectiveness and Waste Reduction Benefits: Weekly meal prep service costs range $60-$120 comparable to eating out frequently and grocery shopping with perishable items that often go uneaten and wasted. Pre-portioned meals eliminate food waste from expired produce and unused ingredients purchased with good intentions. Balanced whole foods approach prevents fast food wolfing down behavior promoting mindful eating. Meal services provide structured nutrition ideal for starting diets, weight loss programs, and maximizing nutrients during stressful periods without meal planning burden or cooking time requirements.

What is a meal prep service?

[video transcript] The number one hack I give for healthy eating for busy professionals is to hire a meal prep service. This is advice I give on a pretty regular basis because a lot of times people don't understand nutrition or they're not good at cooking, or moreover, like most of us, we just simply don't have the time to make a lunch, to make a dinner. We're running around with our busy lives.

So what are meal prep services? These are organizations that will make pre-prepared meals and deliver them to your home or your office, or sometimes they have a storefront, and you can just go in and pick them up. Actually, most of the natural markets these days—I'm thinking about like Sprouts, Whole Foods—they already have a section in the frozen section where somebody has actually made a whole bunch of meals, put 'em together, and you can carry 'em away from the market.

Why meal prep services can be a game-changer

So why do I recommend this? It's really hard to get nutrition in when we're busy. A common pattern that I see is people will skip breakfast, get so busy working, they'll skip lunch, and then they're starving by four or five o'clock. And then they've got to go home and make dinner, which might take another half an hour. So they'll run out and get fast food or snacks, and that just satisfies everything. And they're not getting good nutrition, or it's going to take so long to prep that they say, "Screw it. I'm just going to go out and get something." And then you're kind of left to the nutrition of wherever you're going.

In my parking lot at Chambers Clinic here in Scottsdale, there's a Panda Express and there's a Chipotle, and there's a taco shop up the street. They're not the most nutritious meals in the world, and because it's fast food and because I'm really hungry, I tend to wolf it down. This way, when you hire the meal prep service (the one I've been using lately is called Eat Clean Phoenix; there are dozens of these around the valley), you can make sure you're getting nutrition. Because the other recommendation I make to people is to eat a whole foods diet (not the market, but actually eating whole food). And I recommend getting a protein, a starch, and a veggie, and organizing yourself that way. That's what these services do.

For lunch, for example, I had a buffalo chicken sweet potato. It was a sweet potato with like coleslaw and shredded chicken. It was super simple, super delicious, and I got a protein. I got my starch with the sweet potato and the veggie with the coleslaw. And it had some like, you know, chopped up bell peppers in it as well. It was fantastic. It was about 400 calories. It was really filling.

Benefits and cost-effectiveness of meal prep services

And the other cool thing about these services are two cool things about it. Number one is that you'll get sick of them by the end of the month. And this is what I tell all of my patients. By the end of the month with a particular service, you could either surf around and hire another service and get some fresh meals in. But usually you kind of get sick of it, you'll get your favorites, you eat them, and then you look down at the meals by about two, three weeks and go, "Well, gosh, I can make that!" In the case of the meal I had today, I can make a baked sweet potato, I can get shredded chicken from the store. I can make some coleslaw or have some sort of veggie to go in there as well. I've got buffalo sauce somewhere in the pantry. So you say, "Well, gosh, I can make that." And then when you've repeated this dozens of times, you kind of have a repertoire of things in your head that you can say, "Well, gosh, I can make the buffalo chicken sweet potato. I can make this sort of pasta. I can make this, I can make that." And now you have a really great blueprint from these meal prep services of a healthy meal and what that should look like. And then if you have a busier time, you can always hire 'em again to backstop, and you have these things.

The other thing people say, "Well, doesn't this cost a lot?" And here's the thing that I've found: between eating out all the time, going to the grocery store and getting things that are perishable like fruits and vegetables, and with all the best intentions of making salads and other things, and then getting too busy and not eating them and they perish... it ends up working out to be about the same amount. I would say on a weekly basis, with the meal services that when I hire them, it tends to be between $60 and $120 a week, depending on where and how often I'm going to use those meals. So it ends up working out okay. If I was going to go to the store and just do a big cook and a big meal prep, it might be a whole lot more if I'm not paying attention to my budget, and then I'm wasting like half of it. None of these meals in our house go to waste. I really hate food waste. And so, these things become a great blueprint for getting your nutrition in.

I think if you're starting a diet, for example, meal prep services make great sense 'cause you can't go wrong. They're going to hand you the nutrition. They also will follow different types of diets. You can go to some services; they have Paleo diets specifically. They have Autoimmune Paleo diets. They will have diabetic meals, gluten-free. And they really respect people's allergies.

The other permutation of this that I would throw in there are private chefs. It seems like something that only the elite can have; we always see that celebrities have these people working in their homes, but actually there are lots of private chefs out there who will just simply make you a few different meals, a few different times, and hand them to you in the same way that the meal prep services will deliver to your home, delivered to your office. So look around for that in your city as well.

Meal prep services help maximize nutrients and health

These are great hacks to get any diet started, to get any weight loss program started, and to get in maximum nutrition, which we should be getting in in our stressful world a lot. If you need more fun, practical vitality tips, I suggest you check out my website. It's drdanwool.com. In the meantime, it's Dr. Wool. "Fix your Gut, solve Your Health."