You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

So what's for dinner tonight?

That's the eternal question, right?

And if you're like me, just hearing that question can send a chill down your spine.

I mean, look, food is a beautiful part of life.

It's something we get to enjoy and savor every day.

Yeah, every day.

It's relentless.

You have to feed yourself constantly.

Make a grocery list, go to the store, unpack the bags, cook the food, wash the dishes, and then do it all over again.

It's easy to lose motivation or to get in a rut.

And at that point, it can feel like food is just kind of happening to you.

So it just became like an afterthought for me.

It wasn't something that was really intentional.

Kevin Curry is the founder of the online community FitMen Cook, and he was in a rut

too, until he discovered meal prep. Now just to set definitions here, for some people,

meal prep means making a huge pot of chicken noodle soup and a lasagna on Sunday and eating both

of those all week. For some people, it's making meals and freezing them.

For Kevin, it's cooking a bunch of ingredients at once and then mixing and matching them throughout the week.

But he says these are all meal prep. It is basically having food that's readily available and accessible that's already cooked.

So it's not going to the grocery store at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, starving,

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